Living at the Edge of Thai Society: The Karen in the Highlands of Northern Thailand (Routledgecurzon Studies on South East Asia)

Living at the Edge of Thai Society The Karen are one of the major ethnic minority groups living in the border area bet...

Author: Claudio Delang

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Living at the Edge of Thai Society

The Karen are one of the major ethnic minority groups living in the border area between Thailand and Burma (Myanmar). This book is on the Karen in Thailand, where over half a million Karen live in small villages scattered throughout the northern highlands, at elevations ranging from 600 m to above 1,000 m ASL. Although for centuries they have been living in close proximity with Burmese, Thai and many other ethnic groups, from which they have adopted some customs, the Karen have been able to maintain particular sets of customs, including a language, a religion, a dress code and particular social relations which can be said to differentiate them from other ethnic groups of the region. The profound social and economic transformations that have taken place in Thailand during the last decades have also affected the Karen in many ways. This book discusses the proactive efforts the Karen are making to negotiate their position in Thai society, as well as the ways in which they adapt their ethnic identity, inter-ethnic relations, social practices and customs, land use, economic life and religious beliefs to these socioeconomic transformations and to the ‘development’ policies of the government. The book contains 10 chapters, each written by an expert of the ﬁeld, and is the result of original research carried out in the last few years in northern Thailand. Claudio Delang is interested in the relationship between culture and economy and has been studying the cultural background behind the unequal economic adaptation of the Karen and the Hmong to government development initiatives. His publications include Suffering in Silence: the human rights nightmare of the Karen people of Burma.

Rethinking Southeast Asia Edited by Duncan McCargo University of Leeds

Southeast Asia is a dynamic and rapidly changing region which continues to defy predictions and challenge formulaic understandings. This series will publish cutting-edge work on the region, providing a venue for books that are readable, topical, interdisciplinary and critical of conventional views. It aims to communicate the energy, contestations and ambiguities that make Southeast Asia both consistently fascinating and sometimes potentially disturbing. This series comprises two strands: Rethinking Southeast Asia aims to address the needs of students and teachers, and the titles will be published in both hardback and paperback. RoutledgeCurzon Research on Southeast Asia is a forum for innovative new research intended for a high-level specialist readership, and the titles will be available in hardback only. Titles include: 1 Politics and the Press in Thailand Media Machinations Duncan McCargo 2 Democracy and National Identity in Thailand Michael Kelly Connors 3 The Politics of NGOs in Indonesia Developing Democracy and Managing a Movement Bob S. Hadiwinata 4 Military and Democracy in Indonesia Jun Honna 5 Changing Political Economy of Vietnam The case of Ho Chi Minh City Martin Gainsborough 6 Living at the Edge of Thai Society The Karen in the highlands of northern Thailand Claudio O. Delang

Living at the Edge of Thai Society The Karen in the highlands of northern Thailand Edited by Claudio O. Delang

First published 2003 by RoutledgeCurzon 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeCurzon 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2003 Claudio O. Delang, selection and editorial matter, individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0-203-35645-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-38724-4 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–32331–2 (Print Edition)

Contents

List of contributors Preface Units of measurement 1

Studying peoples often called Karen

vii x xvii 1

RONALD D. RENARD

PART I

Negotiating an ethnic identity Introduction

17 19

JOHN MCKINNON

2

Constructing marginality: the ‘hill tribe’ Karen and their shifting locations within Thai state and public perspectives

21

PINKAEW LAUNGARAMSRI

3

Trapped in environmental discourses and politics of exclusion: Karen in the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary in the context of forest and hill tribe policies in Thailand

43

REINER BUERGIN

4

Community culture: strengthening persistence to empower resistance JOHN MCKINNON

64

vi

Contents

PART II

Social practices and transformations: courtship, marriage, and changing sexual morality Introduction

85 87

YOKO HAYAMI

5

Living for funerals: Karen teenagers and romantic love

90

CHRISTINA FINK

6

Morality, sexuality and mobility: changing moral discourse and self

112

YOKO HAYAMI

7

When it is better to sing than to speak: the use of traditional verses (hta) in tense social situations

130

ROLAND MISCHUNG

PART III

Social and economic adaptation to government development policies Introduction

151 153

CLAUDIO O. DELANG

8

Social and economic adaptations to a changing landscape: realities, opportunities and constraints

155

CLAUDIO O. DELANG

9

The Karen in transition from shifting cultivation to permanent farming: testing tools for participatory land use planning at local level

183

OLIVER PUGINIER

Afterword: the politics of ‘Karen-ness’ in Thailand

210

CHARLES F. KEYES

References Index

219 237

Contributors

Reiner Buergin holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Freiburg, Germany, where he also did studies in forestry. His research in Thung Yai in 1996–1997 concentrated on processes of change in the local Karen communities and the dynamics of their forest and land use system in the context of national and international forest and conservation policies. Presently he is a researcher in the Working Group SocioEconomics of Forest Use at the University of Freiburg. His current research interests focus on interdependencies between conceptualizations of indigenousness and indigenous rights, different approaches to environmental conservation, and commodiﬁcations of ‘place’ and ‘environment’. He is speciﬁcally interested in the impacts of these different conceptualizations, interests, and processes on local communities living in areas protected for ‘nature conservation’. Regionally he concentrates on Southeast Asia, with a main focus on Thailand and the Philippines. Claudio Delang received his PhD in geography from the National University of Singapore. He has been working and conducting ﬁeldwork in Thailand since 1996. His interests lie in the relationship between culture and economy, and he has been studying the cultural background behind the unequal economic adaptation of the Karen and the Hmong to government development initiatives. His publications include Suffering in Silence: the human rights nightmare of the Karen people of Burma and Deforestation in northern Thailand: the result of Hmong farming practices or Thai development strategies? Christina Fink is a socio-cultural anthropologist who received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1994. Her PhD research focused on varying constructions of identity and community among the Pwo Karen in northwest Thailand. She has since conducted research with other Karen communities in Thailand and has examined the impact of politics on family and community life in Burma. She wrote the Introduction to the reprint of Burma and the Karens by Dr San C. Po and is the author of Living Silence: Burma under military rule. She is

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currently a visiting professor at the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute at Chiang Mai University. Yoko Hayami is Associate Professor, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, with a PhD in anthropology (Brown University). She has been conducting ﬁeldwork in northern Thailand since 1987, and more recently also in Myanmar. Her interests have ranged from ritual and religious dynamics, gender and family, urban migration and interrelationships between hills and plains. Articles published include ‘Karen tradition according to Christ or Buddha’ ( Journal of Southeast Asian Studies), ‘Internal and external discourse of communality, tradition and environment: minority claims on forest in the northern hills of Thailand’ (Southeast Asian Studies) and ‘Motherhood redeﬁned: women’s choices on family rituals and reproduction in the peripheries of Thailand’ (Sojourn). Her monograph on religious dynamics among the Karen will be published in early 2004. Charles Keyes is Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at the University of Washington. In 2000–2001 he served as president of the American Association for Asian Studies. He has carried out extended ﬁeldwork in Thailand where he has spent 8 years, and also made numerous shorter ﬁeld trips to Vietnam, Laos, southern China, Cambodia and Burma. His most recent works include Cultural Crisis and Social Memory: modernity and identity in Thailand and Laos (edited with Shigeharu Tanabe, 2002) and ‘ “The peoples of Asia”: science and politics in ethnic classiﬁcation in Thailand, China and Vietnam’, Journal of Asian Studies, 61, 4: 1163–1203, November 2002. Pinkaew Laungaramsri is an anthropologist. She teaches at the Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development (RCSD), Faculty of Social Science, Chiang Mai University, Thailand. She is also the author of Redefining Nature: Karen ecological knowledge and the challenge to the modern conservation paradigm (2001), Chiang Mai: Earthworm Books. Dr John McKinnon, over the past 28 years, has conducted research in the highlands of North Thailand as an advisor in socio-economic research to the Tribal Research Institute under both New Zealand (1975–1978) and French (ORSTOM 1986–1988) aid programmes, and as the Director of Development Studies at the Victoria University of Wellington. He has extensive ﬁeldwork experience with indigenous peoples in the South Paciﬁc (Solomon Islands, Vanuatu) and the Central Massif of mainland Southeast Asia (Yunnan, Guizhou and Thailand). He is a founding member of Kinsa Associates, a group that specializes in training, facilitating and strengthening indigenous voices using participatory learning and action (PLA), and sustainable livelihood approaches with an information technology (IT) and GIS component.

Contributors

ix

Roland Mischung was born in 1947 and studied anthropology, sociology, prehistory and Thai at the universities of Frankfurt and Heidelberg (Germany). In 1979, he took his PhD with a dissertation on the role of religious belief in an upland Sgaw village of northern Thailand. Further ﬁeld research in the area focused on the ‘cultural ecology’ of neighbouring Karen and Hmong villages. After temporary employment by an interdisciplinary research programme on ‘History and Environment in West Africa’, he took up a permanent position as professor of anthropology at the University of Hamburg in 1993 which he still holds. His ﬁelds of interest include religious anthropology, group identity and inter-ethnic relations, local history, conceptions of space, and cultures of mainland Southeast Asia. Oliver Puginier has an academic background in tropical agriculture and development cooperation, and obtained his PhD in agriculture at the Humboldt University Berlin in 2002. He has worked for various development organizations in Tanzania, the Philippines, Thailand and Germany, and always strives to overcome the gap between research and implementation. His major publications are the book Planning, Participation and Policy (GTZ 2002), and the articles ‘ “Participation” in a conﬂicting policy framework: lessons learned from a Thai experience’ (ASEAN Biodiversity), the chapter ‘Participatory GIS as a tool for land use planning in northern Thailand’ (Response to Land Degradation), and ‘Agricultural land-use in eroding uplands: a case study in the Philippines’ (Tropicultura). He is currently lecturer in the faculty of agriculture and forestry at the National University of Laos in Vientiane. Ronald D. Renard has studied people known as Karen since the early 1970s. Since coming to live permanently in Chiang Mai in 1979 he has continued this interest while working at Payap University and for different United Nation agencies as a Project Manager and an independent consultant. He has written several books on northern Thailand and Burma and edited the Journal of the Siam Society and other works.

Preface

The Karen are the largest of the ethnic minority groups living in the mountain range of eastern Burma and northwestern Thailand. In Burma there are between four and six million Karen, while in Thailand there are over 400,000 Karen, most of whom are divided into two subgroups, the Skaw, who call themselves Pgaganyaw, and the Pwo, who call themselves Plong. This book is about the Thai Karen, in particular the large majority who live in the northwestern highlands, in small villages at elevations ranging from 600 m to above 1,000 m above sea level (Figure P.1). The Karen are probably the most widely-studied of the ethnic minority groups who live in the northern highlands of Thailand. Yet, since the edited volume by Charles Keyes, Ethnic Adaptation and Identity: the Karen on the Thai Frontier with Burma, published in 1979, there has been no book focused exclusively on the Karen. This book answers the need for a volume that brings together the various facets of Karen society – ethnic identity, inter-ethnic relations, social practices and customs, economic life, and religious beliefs – so as to clarify their inter-relationships. In so doing, the book also shows how transformations in one of these components affects the others, and the proactive efforts of the Karen to adapt to a Thai society where they are confronted with changes, in mobility, education, religion, and restrictions to land use, which affect all facets of ‘Karenness’. The contributors to this volume all bring different levels of experience in terms of the time they have spent doing research in Thailand. Alongside those who have been involved in research among the Karen for several decades, there are others who present new work from their recent PhD research. However, no matter where their starting point, each chapter in this book is the result of original, unpublished research carried out in the last few years in northern Thailand, and was specially written for this book. The book starts with an introductory chapter by Ronald Renard, and is subsequently divided into three overlapping parts. Renard takes an historical perspective and presents a fascinating overview of the literature on the Karen in Thailand and Burma since the eighteenth century. Although

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xii

Preface

living in the region for centuries, the term ‘Karen’ was hardly ever mentioned in the traditional chronicles because literate societies considered the people as ‘uncivilized’ and, thus, unworthy of written description. Europeans and North Americans, not so constrained, did write about them from the early-1800s. Renard makes the case that, as many ‘Karen’ became Christian, more descriptions appeared in Western writings, so much so that this shaped much of ‘Karen’ identity. In the process, and as the approximately 20 per cent of the ‘Karen’ population that was Christian began writing about themselves, this minority contributed disproportionately to the deﬁnition of ‘Karen’. Various obstacles in Burma, where about 90 per cent of the Karen live, impedes social scientists from studying the ‘Karen’ so that even census estimates were broad and the entire subject highly politicised and poorly understood. In Thailand, however, social scientists have been able to study these groups in increasingly sophisticated ways, which has led to what might be called the emergence of ‘Karen studies’. After this introductory chapter, Part I deals with the ethnic identity of the Karen, and the way they negotiate their position in Thai society. In the ﬁrst chapter – making extensive use of historical Thai documentation – Pinkaew Laungaramsri traces the historical construction of the ‘hill tribe’ Karen and their shifting places within the Thai state. Her discussion focuses primarily on the evolution of Karen ‘marginal’ and shifting locations within the state’s mind, and on how the images and positions of the Karen have changed within the context of contemporary conservation politics. In doing so, the chapter investigates three images of the Karen within the environmental discourse – Karen as chao pa (wild people), as chao khao (hill tribe), and as nak anurak (‘benign savage’ or ‘nature conservationist’). The shift from one image to the others through different discourses has contributed to the downplaying of the Karen’s distinctive historical place within the pre-modern Thai nation-state, as ‘guardians of the frontier’. Her chapter also examines the working of the modern discourse about ‘hill tribes’ and the exercise of the modern state apparatus of ethnic classiﬁcation, which has relocated the Karen to an extreme, inferior position against the Thai, as ‘trouble makers’, non-Thai others who pose threats to the Thai nation. By analysing the positions of the Karen within Thai society, the chapter provides a brief discussion of the diverse social forces such as those of the media, urban-based nature conservationists, and community rights activists that have contributed to the reshaping of a new Karen image of people in ‘harmony with nature’. Reiner Buergin, in the second chapter, focuses on the difﬁcult position faced by the Karen of the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary, Thailand’s ﬁrst natural World Heritage. The area that was declared Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary in 1974 has been inhabited by Karen people for at least 200 years. Efforts of state agencies to resettle them intensiﬁed when the sanctuary was nominated a World Heritage Site in 1991, and

Preface

xiii

recent incidents of coercion and terror towards the Karen in Thung Yai reﬂect forest policies concentrating on the establishment of a Protected Area System preferably free of human interferences. Referring to nationalist and ethnicist sentiments, these conservation policies focus on the exclusion of so-called ‘hill tribes’. Buergin argues that to defend their existence in Thung Yai, the Karen have to refer to alien, national and international discourses to which they have never previously had access. In these discourses the Karen are either conceived as a disruptive factor living in places that have to be protected against human impacts, or as ‘benign environmentalists’ living in harmony with nature. If they take up the latter image, which is closer to their own perception and is the place where they ﬁnd their allies, they risk being denied rights to selfdetermined change. Pointing to the various interests and contexts that determined the shifting of the ‘problem’ Karen in Thung Yai, the chapter questions the hegemony of the external discourses. National and international obligations to democratic principles and human rights require the representation of the Karen in decisions about the place where they live, as well as the appreciation of their traditional rights in Thung Yai and of different local values and objectives. In the third chapter of this section, John McKinnon discusses the way in which environmental and political activists and academics working with minority peoples in the highlands of Thailand form an important pressure group that has been remarkably successful in promoting community culture as a means of assisting people to empower themselves in what Friedman (1992) calls the ‘politics of alternative development’. As a form of self-representation, community culture builds conﬁdence so that it becomes a signiﬁcant strategy of persistence and resistance. To what extent does this strategy promote a largely sentimental, static, essentialist and even hermetic view of culture? McKinnon argues that although the essentialising shortcomings of the approach may obscure the pragmatic qualities, the existential and dynamic nature of culture itself, these representations should not be taken for more than a ritual fragment of the real thing. The Karen continue to live, learn and create their own culture. McKinnon reviews changes that have taken place in Karen communities over the past 25 years and focuses speciﬁcally on events which took place over a few days in the Karen village of Ban Huai Hoi to illustrate the ways in which locally performed and widely disseminated eclectic representations of culture can be used for political ends, building conﬁdence, strengthening persistence and empowering resistance. Part II comprises three chapters that analyse aspects of social life related to the marital bond in the Karen communities. The ﬁrst chapter, by Christina Fink, explores animist Karen teenagers’ quest for romantic love and the rituals and calendrical events that provide opportunities for initiating and deepening romantic attachments. Animist Karen in Thailand and Burma adhere to strict sexual mores which prohibit sex before

xiv

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marriage and strongly promote monogamy. Nonetheless, all Karen teenagers dream of marrying a person with whom they are in love and dedicate much time in their teenage years to preparing for the rituals where they will interact with members of the opposite sex. In particular, Karen teenagers look forward to funerals, when teens pair off in dates and spend the entire night circling the corpse singing love songs to each other. With husbands generally moving to their wives’ villages and the new couple’s household spirits linked to the wife’s ancestors, Karen women have a signiﬁcant say in family decision-making. This is also reﬂected in the courtship period, when Karen girls tend to be allowed to decide whom they will marry and may threaten or even carry out suicide attempts if blocked by their parents. Because Karen romance has not been seriously addressed in the academic literature, this chapter focuses on providing an ethnographic description of courtship practices and ends with an appeal for more research on this topic, and in particular the poetic courtship songs, which fewer and fewer people can sing today. In the second chapter, Yoko Hayami discusses the changing bases of discourses of sexual morality among Karen in Northern Thailand. Within hill Karen communities, practices regarding sexuality and morality are embedded in communal rituals and practices which maintain the social and cosmic order of the land. This however becomes problematic in cases of sexual activity across ethnic boundaries, when women’s sexuality is guarded vis-à-vis non-Karen men. The changing discourse of sexuality in hill Karen communities is shifting its emphasis towards these inter-ethnic contexts, especially with the increasing mobility of youths from the hills to the lowlands. Young Karen women from the hills ﬁnd that they must negotiate between the two realms and the alternative discourses as they move between the city and the hills. Roland Mischung describes how in many Sgaw Karen villages the recitation of hta, i.e. verses that are believed to have been created and subsequently handed down unchanged from the remote ‘elders of the olden times’, still plays an important role in public life. Representing the authentic voice of the revered ancestors, hta verses are marked off from ordinary language by a speciﬁc formal structure, the use of highly ambiguous metaphors as well as the fact that they are rather sung than spoken (at least on ceremonial occasions). Uttering hta is regarded as intrinsically meritorious; by deﬁnition, hta can never be wrong, and the speaker/ singer cannot be held responsible, let alone criticized or blamed, for their metaphoric content. This makes these verses an ideal medium to express sentiments basic to the order of Karen society and to say the unspeakable, i.e. make statements that would otherwise be regarded as an offense to another party. After connecting Karen hta with similar socio-linguistic phenomena elsewhere in Southeast Asia, a preliminary sketch tries to summarise important occasions for their performance in the author’s research area. The subsequent case study analyses a sequence of 21 hta

Preface

xv

that were recorded in the course of a marriage ceremony. These verses serve to express anxieties and latent antagonism in the relationship between the ‘female’ and the ‘male’ side that are typical of this occasion and considered delicate to such an extent that they could not be voiced in plain speech. Here, the singing of hta is interpreted as social performance, as public display of positions and attitudes that underlie interpersonal relations within a local cluster of villages, normally covered over by a pervasive ideology of social harmony. Part III deals with social and economic adaptations to government intervention. In the ﬁrst chapter, Claudio Delang argues against simplistic notions of development that offer descriptive analyses of a society’s economic adaptation to change, but which do so without delving into the cultural reasons for those adaptations. In particular, the chapter discusses why the Karen have been reluctant to enter the larger cash economy when other ethnic minorities (such as the Hmong) have enthusiastically done so. The chapter argues that certain aspects of Karen outlook and social organization limit their acceptance of new ideas and new forms of social relations. Special emphasis is given to Karen indigeny – their strong attachment to locality – and many-strandedness – the inﬂuence that fellow villagers can have on someone’s behaviour. Two areas, with different levels of land scarcity and immigration by Thai and Hmong, are compared to provide a better understanding of the inﬂuence of indigeny and manystrandedness in their economic decision-making process. The chapter argues that the Karen choose to grow cash-crops only when they are forced to do so by high levels of land scarcities, through the weakening of pressures against cash-crops by those who want to remain subsistence rice farmers, and when traders encourage them to do so by selling the inputs on credit and promising to come to buy the harvest. When these pressures do not exist, they attempt to remain subsistence-oriented farmers in spite of the land scarcities introduced by immigration and government forest policies by engaging in birth control. Oliver Puginier, in the second chapter, presents the results of a PhD research project that combined participatory land use planning with simpliﬁed Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and focused on the Karen villages in the project areas of the Thai–German Highland Development Programme (TG–HDP) in Mae Hong Son province. The aim was to overcome the apparent dichotomy between forest preservation and the agricultural subsistence character of farming systems in the transition towards permanent agriculture, against the background of a controversial policy framework. Forest policy has declared that people are neither allowed to settle in forest reserves nor use forest resources. Yet at the same time the government pursues a system of village registration for permanent settlements in the highlands. The Karen are thus caught between the opposing priorities of different ministries and their own struggle for survival. Puginier argues that it is important to ﬁrst have their ways of land

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management recognised by the government, instead of having it merely condemned. As a second step, local planning can be institutionalised under the current process of decentralisation. The author identiﬁed the newly forming Tambon (sub-district) Administrative Organizations (TAO) as a suitable communication platform for the formulation of land use plans, but argues that local initiatives require a policy foundation in order to be effective. The book is drawn to a close with an afterword by Charles Keyes, who examines how Karennic-speaking people in Thailand have been situated as an ethnic group within the country. Charles Keyes argues that the emergence of a Christian-led Karen ethnonationalist movement in Burma has been a signiﬁcant factor in the shaping of identity of Karennic-speaking people as Karen. The Karen-ness of Thai Karennic-speaking peoples has, however, been shaped more by political processes speciﬁc to Thailand. Since the last decades of the twentieth century, Karennic-speaking peoples have increasingly challenged a Thai-government sponsored stigmatised identity as a ‘hill tribe’ (chao khao) and demonstrated – primarily through contestation over management of local natural resources – increasing competence to be effective actors within the Thai system as Thai Karen. This book would not have been possible without the help of several people, but I can only acknowledge the more obvious ones. All the authors, myself included, are grateful to the Karen communities among which we have carried out our work, for the hospitality and friendship extended to us, and are thankful to the Thai government for permitting us to carry out our respective research. We hope that our indebtedness towards the Karen communities may be in a way repaid with this book. On a personal level, I am particularly indebted to Theresa Wong for her help and moral support, to John McKinnon for editorial help, and to Ronald D. Renard, Ananda Rajah and Geoffrey Benjamin for their encouragement, advice and support. Finally I would like to thank the authors of all the chapters for bearing with me for the long time it took from the inception of this book to its publication. Claudio O. Delang, with the authors

Units of measurement

In general we have used the metric system, sometimes with the exception of areas (rai ) and yield (tang). Area (rai ) 1 rai ⫽ 1,600 m2 ⫽ 0.16 ha ⫽ 0.395 acre Volume (tang) 1 tang ⫽ 20 litres Currency (baht) Until June 1997 the baht (B | ) was pegged to the US$ and US$1 was approximately 25 baht. From July 1997 to January 1998 it increased to up to US$1 ⫽ 56 baht. Since March 1998, US$1 is between approximately 38 baht and 43 baht.

1

Studying peoples often called Karen Ronald D. Renard

There are many people in Burma (Myanmar) and Thailand who are known as Karen. Most of these people live in Burma. There are other people in this area who do not call themselves Karen but who are called by Karen by various peoples for sometimes divergent reasons. So many things are unknown about the ‘Karen’ – who they are and who they are not – that one could ask, as Peter Hinton did (1983: 155–168) whether they really do exist. At the same time one could also ask, why should a people called Karen not exist since there have been thousands of articles and books on ‘Karen’ since the early nineteenth century? Prior to that, however, there were almost no references to Karen in written literature. The earliest certain appearance of ‘Karen’ in any language in an English source was in a letter written in 1759 by Captain George Baker of the East India Company.1 Baker noted that these Carianners lived ‘in the woods, of 10 or 12 houses, are not wanting in industry, though it goes no farther than to procure them an annual subsistence’ (Stern 1976: vii). The American Baptist missionary, Francis Mason, recognized that the word, ‘Karen’ was of Burmese origin. He noted that the Burmans ‘apply it to various uncultivated tribes, that inhabit Burmah and Pegu’ (1866b: 1). Mason himself deﬁned the term as designating ‘a people that speak a language of common origin, which is conveniently called Karen; embracing many dialects, and numerous tribes’ (1866b: 1). At least from this time the term ‘Karen’ came into popular use. The word ‘Karen’ has its origins in Carianner which itself is meant to represent the Mon term, kariang, which combines kha and riang. Kha is a term referring to a class of human beings that occurs in the world of Tai speakers.2 In this setting, tai are a kind of people found in valleys who were seen as possessing such civilized (i.e. Indianized) attributes as written literature, a major religion such as Buddhism, an elaborate system of kingship, law codes, and large religious ediﬁces.3 Living beyond the pale of the Tai were forest-dwelling animist people known as kha. Riang, which is also sometimes pronounced yang, refers to various groups of forest people living around lowland tai groups and speaking dialects of what linguists

2

Ronald D. Renard

call either Karennic or Waic languages in the Mon-Khmer language family. In Burmese, kariang is pronounced kayin. This in turn is the source of the English word ‘Karen’, which retains the original ‘r’ from Early Burmese. The English either learned the term from Arakanese (also known as Yakine) or directly from the Mon. Both the Arakanese and the Mon pronounce the term with this original ‘r’. The Thai word kariang came directly from the Mon although there are many (Karen) people on the Thai side of the border, from Phetchaburi north to Chiang Rai, who were known as yang. Those using the terms kariang or kayin or related forms were neither ethnographers nor linguists. They used such terms to denote various similar looking groups of people who might or might not be related linguistically. The ‘Black’ Karen, for example, speak a Mon-Khmer language, part of a family quite different from Karennic languages. Although the Mon, Burmese, and Thai knew the word kariang (or kayin), they hardly ever used it in writing before the nineteenth century. According to the Mon scholar, H.L. Shorto, although the term kariang appears in a work written in about 1710 (Gawampati ), there are no references to Karen in Mon chronicles (Shorto, personal correspondence). Similarly, there are no references to kariang in the Ayutthayan chronicles (Cushman 2000). The ﬁrst certain occurrence of kariang in Thai occurs only during the reign of King Rama I, in 1809.4 Part of the reason for the absence of references in the chronicles is that the written literature of kingdoms such as Ayutthaya, Hanthawaddy, and Ava, recorded royal and ‘civilized’ events, such as the king’s activities, battles, and religious undertakings. The life of the common people, even ethnic Thais, went all but unrecorded. There are scarcely any references to village life, food, dress, agriculture, forestry, or livestock. This was the case for tai as well. Not only did chronicles ignore these forest dwellers because they were ‘uncivilized’, members of these groups themselves often actively sought to avoid attracting the attention of their neighbours. For centuries they deliberately lived in remote areas out of the way of stronger groups. Take for example the account written by the American Baptist missionary, George Dana Boardman. Even to someone such as him, born in 1801 in the small town of Livermore on the edge of the frontier in Maine where he learned about wilderness ﬁrsthand, the natural obstacles were impressive. The Karens live very much scattered and in places almost inaccessible to any but themselves and the wild beasts. The paths which lead to their settlements are so obscurely marked, so little trodden, and so desirous in their course, that a guide is needed to conduct one from village to village, even over the best part of the way. Not unfrequently the path leads over precipices, over cliffs and dangerous declivities, along deep ravines, frequently meandering with a small streamlet for

Studying peoples often called Karen

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miles, which we have to cross and recross, and often to take it for our path, wading through water ankle deep for an hour or more. There are no bridges, and we often have to ford or swim over considerable streams, particularly in the rainy season. . . . And when, after having encountered so many difﬁculties, and endured not a little fatigue in travelling, and been exposed to so many dangers, we come to a village, we ﬁnd, perhaps, but twenty or thirty houses, often only ten, and not unfrequently only one or two within a range of several miles. (Quoted in King 1836: 164–165) Villages were sometimes surrounded by elaborate defences of bamboo poles and pickets with intricately devised gates. Many times the reasons for such fortiﬁcations were to keep tigers and other wild animals out. Other times the object of the defences was human prowlers. In The Karen Apostle, by the Baptist missionary Francis Mason, a picture (Figure 1.1) shows a woman ascending a ladder about 4 metres in height (1846: 2). An introductory note by H.J. Ripley states that ‘many (houses) are built in this way’ (ibid. 5).

Figure 1.1 A woman ascending a ladder (from Mason, 1846: 2).

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Also noted in Mason’s book was the fear the Karen had of outsiders in the 1820s. Warned by the Burmese in about 1825 that the British were ﬁerce and dangerous, Karen in the Tavoy (Dawei) area took evasive action in ways that showed they knew how to stay hidden. When, however, the news came that the foreigners had entered the mouth of Tavoy River, the Karens let themselves down over the wall of the city by night, and ﬂed into the jungles. Then the Karens all ran and secreted themselves, both men and women, and children; cooking food only when the smoke could be concealed by the clouds and vapors; for they were apprehensive that, if the Burmans were overcome, they would ﬂy also, and trace them by the smoke. (Mason 1846: 19) These peoples often lived in longhouses. These readily-assembled simple structures facilitated the frequent moves made by such groups of people as these. Not only would they move to avoid danger from marauding groups, but they also migrated following outbreaks of smallpox or other contagious deadly diseases. Features of some longhouses indicated their defensive nature. In one form of longhouse, a long plank or bamboo stalk, which ran along the edge of the structure, served as the pillow for many inhabitants. When danger arose, an alarm rap on the plank startled the entire house awake (Sonny Daenpongpee and Thra Hasa, interviewed 1976).5 Karen in Thailand were also found in equally remote areas. The famous Thai poet, Sunthon Phu, recorded a visit to Kariang in Song Phi Nong District of Suphanburi in about 1820. He told that when Thais running away from their (presumably Thai) masters settled next to Karen there, the Karen would help ﬁght off or kill those who came to apprehend the runaways (Sunthon Phu 1967: 54). Yet there were also cases where some of these ‘Karen’ wished to avoid contact even with other ‘Karen’. The Commissioner of Pegu, Colonel Arthur Phayre, described such a situation in an account of groups in Toungoo he referred to as Karen, including Paku, Mopaga, Tunic Bghai and Pant Bghai, Mauniepaga, Sgau, and Wewau, the dialects of most which were mutually unintelligible. Up to the year 1853, the several (Karen) tribes, and it may even be said the different villages of the same tribe, lived in a state of enmity and actual warfare with each other. By open force or by stealthy manœuvre, they would capture women and children, and sell them as slaves to other tribes; while they generally put to death all grown-up men who fell into their power. (Phayre quoted in Mason 1862: 284)

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Living outside the control of people in lowland kingdoms and trying to escape the reach of related groups in nearby hills, these people often described themselves as orphans. Among the most frequently told tales of orphanhood is one about the deity Ywa and his three sons, a Caucasian, a Burman or a Thai, and a Karen, living in a time uncountable ages ago. Ywa gave them a golden, silver, and paper book, respectively. The Caucasian took this book with him to make his fortune amidst a vibrant civilization, and the Thai or Burman did the same with the silver book. But the unfortunate Karen foolishly left the book in the ﬁeld where a pig tore it up and chickens ate it. Without the word of Ywa, they can now only catch glimpses of the divine message through deciphering what they see as letters on thigh bones (Mason 1866a: 231). Another popular story tells how their ancestor, Htaw Mei Paw, who had killed an auspicious boar, managed to get out of sight and so far beyond them that they could not catch up with him while they foolishly tried to boil shellﬁsh in order to eat them, shell and all. Historians attempting to ﬁll the gap between the distant past when the ‘Karen’ originated and the nineteenth century face formidable obstacles. With neither a written record nor a continuous tradition of oral history, historians seeking to record the past of such ‘Karen’ peoples, who in the early nineteenth century would have disavowed such a name, have little on which to rely. The oral literature of these people, however, is indeed rich, with village headmen and religious leaders maintaining stores of tales meant for maintaining good behaviour, guaranteeing proper ritual actions and kinship relationships, as well as providing good harvests. In this it resembles the oral literature of other shifting cultivators in the highlands, such as the Palawans of the Philippines. While not having a strong historical component, the Palawan’s oral tradition is rich in ethnic lore. Besides serving a didactic function for all aspects of Palawan life, the oral literature such as the epic, Mamiminbin (The Quest for a Wife), is expressive and complex poetry. The journeys made by the epic’s protagonist, Mamiminbin, serve to build a harmonious social space (based on the norms of Palawan custom), at the centre of which is his house and hamlet (Revel and Intaräy 2000). The social space of these groups known as Karen is also deﬁned in its oral literature. But remarkably, their lore from the early nineteenth century remains recorded in print. A vast store of information has been recorded in a kind of Karen encyclopaedia written from 1847–1850. Just the title indicates the scope of the work: Thesaurus of Karen Knowledge Comprising Traditions, Legends or Fables, Poetry, Customs, Superstitions, Demonology, Therapeutics, etc., Alphabetically arranged to form a Complete Native Karen (Sgaw) Language Dictionary with deﬁnitions, examples or illustrations of usage of every word (Sa Kaw-Too and Wade 1847–1850). In 1915 the ﬁrst volume was revised. In the process some of the key words were also listed in English.

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No other ethnic group in Southeast Asia is so well documented. Yet the Karen Thesaurus has been little used in scholarly research both because of its scarcity and because it was written in a Tavoy dialect of Sgaw not well understood by people from outside the region. Maintaining a historical record seems to have been a task of lesser importance to these Karen groups. While many topics are covered in a work meant to be comprehensive, there is no section in the Karen Thesaurus on history. This reﬂects their ordinary life in which they do not preserve relics of their chiefs, but instead abandon or burn such relics at the cremation. The only village site Karen associate with a particular chief is the village’s immediately previous locale. No gravesites mark the burial places of their chiefs nor are statues or other physical representations of old chiefs customarily made. Unlike some traditional groups, such as those in Rwanda or the Yoruba states, the Sgaw and Pwo had no ‘professional historians’ who sang or told poems about erstwhile leaders. Furthermore, unlike groups such as the Bemba of northeastern Zambia who also lack professional historians but keep alive the memory of old chiefs (Robert 1973: 12–28), the so-called Karen have few such tales. There are, however, accounts written by twentieth-century Westerneducated people who proudly proclaim themselves as Karen with a past dating back thousands of years. These accounts seem to have originated in speculations by nineteenth-century missionaries in Burma on the ancient Karen past. Seeing that these people had stories in their mythology resembling Old Testament tales, such as that of the ﬂood and of a god named Ywa (resembling Yaweh), some missionaries wondered if Karen were one of the lost tribes of Israel. Others sought to place them, based on references by Marco Polo or other old accounts, in kingdoms in Central Asia. The most complete history of this type of history is Kanyau atà ˇsi tai ˇsi (History of the Karen) which was written by a Sgaw journalist named Sau Au La (sometimes written Saw Aung Hla) in the 1930s. He tells of a migratory past in Asia that had the Karen travelling to and from such places as the Gobi Desert and the Middle East before reaching Tibet out of which they moved to what is now Burma. In the end neither missionaries nor scholars agree. No European or North American author ever became sufﬁciently convinced of these stories to put such a history down in writing themselves. Sau Au La’s history, however, has many conﬁrmed adherents. The text has been reproduced recently by Images Asia, an NGO based in Thailand, and is being distributed widely in refugee camps on Thailand’s western border. No matter what, all the imponderables, and despite the wishes of some Karen nationalists, mean that, for lack of corroborating evidence, prehistory for the Karen must be said to be anything prior to the nineteenth century. Much of the identity of these people often known as Karen is as orphans, living on the fringes of major powers without the book of civilization, or for that matter a veriﬁable ancient past.

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As beﬁts their orphan status, it is even uncertain which language family Karen belongs to. While most linguists contend that Karen is TibetoBurman, some are less sure. The earliest linguists who studied the language, such as George Grierson, saw it ﬁrst as ‘Tai-Chinese’, as it was listed in the 1901 and 1911 censuses of India, and then later as ‘independent’, as noted in the Linguistic Survey of India (India 1927 I [1]: 39). One of the ﬁrst to suggest that Karen was a Tibeto-Burman language was the outstanding epigraphist, G.H. Luce. However, he later changed his mind. According to a letter he sent me in 1976, In the June 1959 Vol. XLIV (1) of the Journal of the Burma Research Society, I published a lecture (given in March 1954) (in which I. . .) strongly said (as I now sadly realise) and have contradicted in a chapter on the Burma Karens in a still unpublished book on the hill tribes of Burma) that ‘Karen is basically a Tibeto-Burman language’. According to Luce, years previously while living in Taunggyi, where many Pa-O (speaking a language closely related to Pwo) reside, he found that they used many Old Burmese, rather than Modern Burmese, terms and he then ‘jumped to the wrong conclusion’. Subsequent comparative study of over a thousand words of Karen suggested that ‘roughly half of its vocabulary seems unique’ which he provisionally called ‘Pure Karen’ (correspondence from G.H. Luce 1976). Arising out of this work, R.B. Jones examined a list of 367 Karen words. Of these he found that 63 were Austric, 130 were Sino-Tibetan, and the remaining 174 were ‘pure’ Karen. Based on this the Thai linguist, Suriya Ratanakul concluded that from a basic source of Sino-Tibetan, there were two branches: Tibeto-Karen and Chinese. It is from the former she suggests that the Tibeto-Burman languages descend (Suriya 1986 [1]: xvii–xviii). Two other linguists, Paul Benedict and Søren Egerod reach similar conclusions. Jones’s position differs slightly from this. In a letter to Charles Keyes, he observed that words clearly Mon or Sino-Tibetan were relatively rare in Karen. ‘Many words’, says Jones, ‘are Burmese; they do not correspond for tone and are no doubt borrowings (in my opinion). . . . I myself lean rather toward a Karen-Thai relationship, but still without any solid evidence’ (cited in Keyes 1979a: 10–11). Burmese publications, however, and citing Luce’s earlier writings, state that Karen is a Tibeto-Burman language (Burma Socialist Programme Party 1967: 18–19). They are joined by the American linguists, James Matisoff and David Solnit, who see Karennic and Burman both as part of the Tibeto-Burman family. Despite the efforts by many Karen to avoid contact with others, some Karen did interact with their neighbours frequently. As early as 1862 Mrs Mason observed that many Pwo had given up wearing their costume in favour of Burmese dress (Mason 1862: 154). The process continued to the

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point where, in 1924, James Lee Lewis examined the phenomenon in his master’s thesis, The Burmanization of the Karen People of Burma. The uncertainty contributes to the considerable doubt existing over how many Karen there are. The 1931 census of Burma, which was the last to cover the entire country as well as to distinguish between ethnic groups, reported 1,367,000 Karen out of a total population of some 14 million in the country. The 1983 census reports that 57.1 per cent of Karen State and 6.5 per cent of Tenasserim Division were Karen (Burma 1987a: 1–14; Burma 1987b: 1–14). However, the number of Karen may well have been higher since many Pwo, especially in or near the Irrawaddy Delta areas such as Tharawaddy, Prome, and Hanthawaddy, were speaking Burmese so well and frequently that they hardly spoke Pwo. Today almost no Pwos there speak any Pwo or Sgaw dialect but it is often said of them, by other ‘Karen’, that they ‘are one hundred per cent Karen’. Not so census takers who, using language as the critical indicator, reported these non-Pwo or Sgaw speakers as Burman. Similarly, Karen Buddhists were routinely recorded as Burmese because census takers considered this a Burmese trait and that once Karen converted to Buddhism they automatically became Burmese. Perhaps from similarly politicized motives, the Karen National Union (KNU) used a similar conceptual framework for census estimates. Trying to overcome obstacles such as those listed above, the KNU estimated in 1986 that some 7 million Karen lived in the country. The KNU webpage, accessed in October 2001, repeats this estimate (www.karen.org KNU 2001). Although the KNU complained that the British Burma government relied too much on language rather than ethnicity, the KNU did the same. When, in their estimate, they included all groups speaking a Karennic language (including Kayah and Pa-O) and others called Karen because of similar outward appearance (like Black Karen), they overlooked the fact that most members of such groups did not consider themselves Karen (Population Figures of the Karens 1986: 23–24). A different approach was taken by the Burma Socialist Programme Party. In a thorough study of Karen culture and society, no estimate of total population was made, the editors only giving the ofﬁcial ﬁgure for Kawthoolei (now Kayin) State (Burma Socialist Programme Party 1967). Given the lack of certainty on Karen population ﬁgures today, a provisional place to start would be the midpoint between the KNU ﬁgure and the 1931 census ﬁgure. If so, there would be 3 million people living in Burma who would admit to being known as Karen. In one of the few other estimates, and probably based considerably on anecdotal information and conjecture, Diran suggests that there are 4 million Karen (1997: 220). To this should be added the approximately half million such people who live in Thailand where counting Karen numbers is less difﬁcult and where the ﬁgure should be reasonably accurate. As the difﬁculties in estimating the population of the Karen indicates, conditions in Burma regarding ethnic minorities have been heavily politi-

Studying peoples often called Karen

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cized. Serious study of any groups, Karen included, is not now possible. Even in the old Karen centres such as Pa-an or in institutions where Karen have studied for decades, such as the Insein Seminary (now MIT, the Myanmar Institute of Theology), the study of Karen is difﬁcult at best. While a number of interesting works have been produced in the last few decades, such as History of the Burma Divinity School by Johnny Maung Lat and Biographical Sketches of Noted Karen Leaders, a master’s thesis by Saw Christopher, no serious work on Karen has been produced. Very few books or articles of any kind have been written in recent years on these people as a group or individually in Burma (except on rebels near the Thai border or refugees on the Thai side).6 A few videos have been produced on ethnic groups – but they are made for mass market consumption and provide only a shallow and scattered representation of Karen life in the country (for example, A Kayin Village). Although works of ﬁction sometime provide insights into village life or ethnic relations in the country’s interior, no academic study of any group called Karen of any kind in Burma has been conducted in that country since F.K. Lehman did research in Kayah State in the early 1960s. Thus it is not surprising that in the midst of all this uncertainty, fanciful representations of these people should have been created. One was in a stage presentation of Phuchana Sip Thit (Winner of the Ten Directions), about the sixteenth-century Burmese King Bayinnaung and his (largely victorious) campaigns against Thai kingdoms to the east. Written by a descendant of the northern royal family of Phrae who used the penname Yakhop, the play has become a favourite of contemporary Thai drama. One character, the ‘Dakhayi’ is Karen. One example of the costume worn by this fanciful Karen is shown in Figure 1.2. Thailand, however, has been the site of a considerable amount of writing on these people, particularly recently in non-chronicular literature. Thai poets, at least since Sunthon Phu in the early 1800s, wrote about Kariang. Some decades later, when King Chulalongkorn visited the area of Kanchanaburi to the west of Bangkok on the way to Burma, he met Kariang three times. Each time he recorded the meetings and much interesting detail in verse. Some of his encounters he found amusing, such as the bamboo dance described below. Girls, girls, these Karen, they’re lovely, lovely. Tresses bunned, they’ve smartly ﬁne ﬂair. Trimmed with ticals tightly rupees round. Talced so, fair fetching faces. Spry stirring lasses whir steps glad. But be near: bad odor. Robed in smocks, they’re clad, cloth homespun. Thai, Karen can’t answer: blank bovine stares. (Chulalongkorn 1962: 375, provisional translation by author)7

Figure 1.2 Example of a costume worn by a Karen character (Phuchana Sip Thit 1977, back cover).

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More serious accounts also began to appear about the same time. Under the new administrative system introduced by King Chulalongkorn in the late nineteenth century, central government ofﬁcials were supposed to visit all villages in the kingdom to organize the election of village heads. Some records of these visits remain in the National Archives of Thailand, for example one by a high-ranking ofﬁcial, Prince Woradet Sakdawut, to Ratchaburi and Kanchanaburi where he met people he called Kariang and explained the election in detail (NA R5 M58/33). In the same tradition was an account of Kariang in the Monthon (Circle) of Ratchaburi. Included in this was a history of the Karen in the Three Pagodas Pass area who had royal titles such as Phra Si Suwannakhiri (Lord of the Golden Mountain) (Monthon Ratchaburi 1925). Thailand was quite unlike British Burma in that almost no missionaries preached to the Sgaws or Pwos. Few became Christian, fewer joined the civil service and almost none received a higher education.8 One result was a lack of published works in Sgaw or Pwo. Another was that Pwos and Sgaws in Thailand lagged behind those in Burma in terms of politicization and awareness of the modern world. Only after World War II did this begin to change. When the American Baptist Mission came to Thailand in 1947, one of its aims was to extend the work they had been doing in Burma to Thailand. Beginning in the north of the country they conducted a series of exploratory surveys in mainly Sgaw areas in Chiang Mai and Mae Hong Son provinces. The survey reports provide some of the earliest detailed information on these peoples in Thailand.9 Then in the 1960s when Peter Kunstadter, Charles Keyes and others began researching Sgaws in the north, anthropological ﬁeld research came to be conducted on these groups. Very little such ﬁeld work had been conducted even in Burma, where almost all the written accounts of these people were by missionaries or government ofﬁcials. In the early 1970s, these two and other social scientists including Theodore Stern, Shigeru Iijima, David Marlowe, F.K. Lehman, Peter Hinton, Kirsten Ewer, and Anders Baltzer Jørgensen, carried out pioneering work.10 Later researchers included Michael Mahda, Roland Mischung, Ananda Rajah, and Yoko Hayami who have conducted serious and productive research on different groups in Thailand. Studies by these individuals added considerably to the information recorded on village life and traditions. In addition were a number of historical studies such as those by Hovemyr (1989), Petry (1993), and Renard (2000). A number of the social scientists in Thailand from 1960 on – Stern, Ewer, Jørgensen, and Hinton wrote on the Pwo, who until this time had been little studied, since most Karen Christians were Sgaw. Harry Ignatius Marshall, author of a comprehensive study of Karen in general, for example, noted in his Preface (Marshall 1922: vii) that he wrote more on the Sgaw with whom he was more familiar.

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All these studies contributed signiﬁcantly to knowledge about Sgaws, Pwos, and related groups. Although early detailed accounts by individuals such as the Masons, Wade (and his team of co-workers in the Karen Thesaurus) and, to a lesser degree by McMahon (1876) had provided much information on indigenous culture, later accounts on these peoples grew more administrative in nature. Later writings were less on issues of traditional culture, such as found in the Karen Thesaurus, but more on routine church work. Dozens of works produced in Burma from the late 1800s on provide detailed information on church building, the issue of self-support (whether churches should be funded from overseas or from the members), and evangelization. The transition is shown in articles published in the Sgaw-language Morning Star (Hsätoòkau) that was founded in 1843 and was according to Mason, the ‘ﬁrst native paper ever published east of the Ganges’ (Mason 1870: 227). Started in Tavoy under the guidance of persons such as Jonathan Wade, who guided the preparation of the Karen Thesaurus, early articles discussed indigenous traditions along with church business. By the late nineteenth century, when various reports were published on visits to Chiang Mai by Christians from Burma, attitudes had changed. The titles of some articles indicate the priorities of the writers: ‘The Karen Churches in Northern Siam’ (May 1891), ‘Minutes of the Karen Association in Northern Siam’ ( June 1893), ‘Letter from the Northern Siam Mission’ (August 1895), and ‘Siam Baptist Karen Association 16th Anniversary 1904’ (Morning Star). For some Sgaw and Pwo Christians this led to a distrust of their traditions. Esther Danpongee notes regarding Karen theology: ‘I did not understand very clearly what the term might mean. My lack of understanding, in fact, led me to disparage the traditional theology of my own tribe. It caused me to misunderstand the original beliefs of our ancestors’ (Esther 1999: 1). Outside groups, sometimes evangelical churches working with Sgaw and Pwo Christians contributed to this. In 1971 the Southern Baptists produced a movie in Mae Hong Son province, entitled Mae Sariang Thi Rak (My Dear Mae Sariang) portraying Sgaws as good Samaritans. The moviemakers portrayed Sgaw music as being played with guitars (the 7, 8, or 9 string harp, the tena were shown but not heard) and the leading roles went to Thais (including the longtime popular actor, So Atsanachinda). While many Sgaws delighted in the movie, the denatured culture portrayed in it contributed little to pride in their traditions. Nevertheless, attitudes regarding their indigenous traditions have begun to change. Esther and others are beginning to re-examine their theology and religious traditions. Under the leadership of the former Baptist missionary, Ed Hudspith, who had pioneered the writing of a large body of Christian literature in Sgaw, the Karen Thesaurus has been digitized. He and a team of elders and scholars plan to translate it into modern Sgaw (and partially into English) so that it can be used more

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widely. He also was responsible for arranging a number of books on Sgaw traditions to be republished or written in Chiang Mai. A unit of the KNU in Thailand has actually completed retyping the work and republishing it. New trends in what might be called Karen studies in Thailand developed with the growing strength of the environmentalist movement in the 1980s. Growing out of work done by Kunstadter and some fellow researchers, notably the foresters Sanga Sabhasri (1978) and Paul Zinke (1978), considerable interest developed over traditional rotational shifting cultivation practices. Two detailed discussions of the biodiversity and sustainability inherent in these systems are by a Thai NGO worker (Waralak 1998) and a Karen (Thawee 1998).11 Similarly inspired by environmentalists, accounts have been starting to appear in the 1990s detailing the indigenous wisdom of Sgaw elders in Thailand. Besides traditional farming practices, such books describe the entire range of Sgaw traditions as environmentally sound, moral, and sustainable responses to making a living in the forests. One such book is a collection of hta by Johni Odochao. This headman of Nong Tao Village in Mae Wang District, Chiang Mai, is descended from a line of well-respected elders, and is something of a folk hero among NGO workers and environmentalists in northern Thailand (and also an advisor to the National Economic and Social Development Board of Thailand). Hta are stories, generally short and with a moral. Sometimes they can be sung to the sound of Karen instruments such as the tena but they can also be spoken unaccompanied. An example (with a provisional translation by the author) is ( Johni 1998): Ta Chu Ko Lo Ta Wa Lo Pha

Black be Natural White, Silver Crumbles

Black means, in this hta, things that are old, such as utensils, or household livestock, such as pigs or buffaloes. White means things that are sold for silver (money). The new things which this money buys are apt to be short-lived. Another example is an autobiography by Pho (Father) Le Pa, from Mae Chaem District, just to the west of Johni’s village. He tells of growing up in the changing times of the second half of the twentieth century when Mae Chaem went through major transformations. He tells of his traditional learning, the indigenous rituals, and their agriculture, handicrafts, and other customs. So compelling is his tale that the book has gone into its ﬁfth printing (Pho Le Pa and Kalaya 1996). A number of Hta are also available in print. One of the most accessible (and in Sgaw) is The Golden Book which was originally published in 1955 in Burma, showing that there was some continued interest in traditional learning in the mid-1900s (Thra Htoo Hla E 1955). Later the book was republished in Chiang Mai by the Thailand Baptist Convention.

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It is ironic that the future of this something called ‘Karen studies’ rests in Thailand where only about 10 per cent of the total population lives. Among the Karen of Burma, who received modern education prior to those of Thailand, there are some who look condescendingly at their more rustic brethren to the east. While there may be some basis to this, it is among these more remote Karen that many of their traditions have been preserved. By the 1970s when social scientists found it possible to study Sgaw and Pwo village life, many of the old ways in Burma had already disappeared. Conditions that facilitated research in Thailand allowed much pioneering work to be done there. Future possibilities include combining research methodologies utilized in Thailand together with studies of the written lore from Burma (such as the Karen Thesaurus). Perhaps this work, and that of the articles in this work, will help resolve another longstanding issue: whether or not the Karen really do exist.

Notes 1 According to Stuart (1909: 5) an Italian missionary, Fr. Nerini, referred to Karen in 1740, which makes this an earlier reference, but attempts to ﬁnd the original term used for ‘Karen’ have so far failed. 2 In Burmese the same civilized-uncivilized dichotomy was found: the Burmese often called Sgaw and Pwo yain (wild). 3 Tai is the source of the word Thai, as in Thailand. Often Thailand is translated as ‘land of the free’, in an allusion to Thailand having escaped Western colonialism. However, tai refers to being a free person in the sense of not being a slave. 4 There were references in the historical accounts of Chiang Mai to nyang (yang), that is the so-called Red Karen living in what is now Kayah State, that date to the seventeenth century or perhaps earlier. One very early reference, from 1351 or 1352, is in Tamnan Phrathat Chao Hariphunchai Changwat Lamphun (Account of the Relic of Hariphunchai Temple, Lamphun Province), p. 37, to yang biang (lowland Yang). These references are to groups living in a state-like situation with rulers who were considered ‘civilized’ royalty. 5 Thra Hasa, Sgaw Karen mission worker from the Burma Delta. Interviewed in Chiang Rai 16 October 1976. Sonny Daenpongpee, Sgaw Karen from Musikee (Wat Chan), Mae Chaem, Chiang Mai, then studying at the Thailand Theological Seminary in Chiang Mai, later the General Secretary of the Karen Baptist Convention of Thailand. Interviewed on several occasions in 1976 and 1977 and after 1980. 6 There is ample information on rebels and refugees on the border, as well as dozens of reports by members of these groups on issues related to cross-border migration. 7 In the account of Thao Suphatthikanphakdi, written about a trip in 1873, from which the verse is translated, the king wrote as if he were a court lady in order to caricature her (perhaps pompous) manner. 8 The earliest known Sgaw graduate, Mr Thom Nithithom, a native of Mae Sariang in Mae Hong Son Province received his degree from Chulalongkorn University in about 1960 to become a lawyer. 9 They are available at the Payap University Archives in Chiang Mai. All the early

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records of the Thailand Baptist Missionary Fellowship are stored here. Those older than 25 years are open to the public for study. 10 Results of studies by the ﬁrst six of these researchers can be found in Keyes (1979b). For work by Ewer and Jørgensen, see articles in Egerod and Sørensen (1977). 11 The systems are sustainable of course if there is sufﬁcient space to manage them properly. Much recent pressure on land use in the northern Thai hills, including an increased amount of land reserved for forests and parks, migration into the hills, and the building of resorts and other such facilities have sharply reduced the land available for swiddening. While some farmers have intensiﬁed their practices, many have shifted to other agricultural practices or changed entirely the way they make a living.

Part I

Negotiating an ethnic identity

Introduction to Part I John McKinnon

The authors of the three chapters in Part I address in their own way the subordinate position of the Karen in Thai society within a general discourse on what the term ‘hill tribe’ has come to mean. Pinkaew Laungaramsri of Chiang Mai University provides a fascinating and thoroughly well documented overview of where the Karen sit within the ‘new order of the modern Thai nation-state’ which generally classiﬁes highland peoples as ‘non-citizen, alien other’. Making extensive use of historical Thai documentation she traces the changing image of the Karen as chao pa (wild people), chao khao (hill tribe) and nak anurak (benign savage or nature conservationist) and the demise of their earlier place in Thai history as guardians of the frontier and forest. Dr Pinkaew references ways in which a range of Karen communities live within a nationalist framework mired with pejorative nomenclature to variously (re)represent themselves as ‘peace-loving, unambitious forest preservers’ as well as activists willing to engage in political action. The two remaining authors make special reference to communities in which they have conducted ﬁeldwork. Reiner Buergin places his focus on the extremely difﬁcult position faced by the Karen of the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary, Thailand’s ﬁrst natural World Heritage Site from which the people constantly face expulsion. He asks: how can this be the case? Why is the Karen presence seen as disruptive, antagonistic to state interests? What justiﬁed the army-supported assault on the Karen mounted by the Director General of the Royal Forest Department on 13 April 1999? In answering this question he provides not only a thoroughly well documented explanation but a profound comment on the way external discourses inﬂuence the Thai government’s response. For Dr Buergin the Karen are trapped by an external discourse on the environment, which reinforces the underlying politic of exclusion. For those who over the years have witnessed the summary, scattered attacks on hill tribe people like the unsuspecting Akha communities, who were rounded up, their villages burnt and their inhabitants placed in the backs of trucks and unceremoniously dumped on the Burmese border in 1988, or the invasion of Hmong villages and the

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involuntary resettlement of the Hmong villagers from Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary in 1986, Dr Buergin provides a very civilized way of talking about the unacceptable. John McKinnon uses work carried out over a very brief period in the village of Ban Huai Hoi, Amphoe Mae Wang to reﬂect on changes in Karen society over the past 30 years and the willingness of people to accept change. He places his comments in the context of an activist meeting held on 11–12 June 1997 organized by the Inter Mountain Peoples Educational and Cultural Training Association (IMPECT) mounted in association with the largely Karen Northern Farmers Network. He focuses on the sophisticated manner in which the 2-day meeting was designed to impress the media and show how contemporary Karen organizations and their friends represent Karen. Rather than the isolated, semisubsistent and self-contained communities of an essentialized Karenland, those who participated in the gathering presented themselves as full members of a pluralist Thailand in which ethnic and cultural groups should be free to maintain their own traditions, practices and attitudes; a society that accepts diversity and responsibility for the environment. Although this politically astute position may be ahead of its time, Dr McKinnon prefers it to the use of the indigenous card which privileges separate identity and a romantic and naïve, Rousseauan view of the world centred on the sacred, spiritual native. He argues that if used exclusively such a sentimental representation perpetuates a colonial view that lends itself to continuing subordination. Both researchers and those with whom they work need to make use of the tougher tools of science. Each chapter brings a different point of view to the question of how the Karen are seen in contemporary Thai society; how this epistemology was generated; how this inﬂuences the way they are treated and how in special arenas Karen can take charge of this knowledge to (re)represent themselves.

2

Constructing marginality The ‘hill tribe’ Karen and their shifting locations within Thai state and public perspectives Pinkaew Laungaramsri A name is more than a label. . . . The term is pejorative, misleading but so ﬁrmly established in daily speech that mention of ‘hill tribes’ leaves no doubt about who is being named. ( John McKinnon 1989: 307) It is when the native is a national native that the metaphysical and moral valuation of roots in the soil becomes especially apparent. (Liisa H. Malkki 1997: 60) I am Pagagayaw, the free man who roams every place where there is woods and mountains. Other tribal fellows call me ‘yang galoe’−‘kariang’. But I am the tribe of human beings. ‘I am human being’ is the proclamation of the name of my tribe. (Pho Le Pa 1993, author’s translation)

Resettlement, arrest, and forceful intimidation have become commonly accepted methods for solving the problems believed to be caused by the so-called ‘hill tribe’ people. In the year 1998 alone, there were more than 20 cases of people being charged as ‘illegal encroachers’ by forestry ofﬁcials in Chiang Mai (Northern Development Foundation 1998). All of these alleged ‘criminals’ are identiﬁed as ‘hill tribes’. In the most recent incident which occurred in February 1999, H’tin people, an ethnic group living in the Doi Phu Kha National Park, Nan province, were threatened with arrest because ‘they destroy the forest’.1 Interestingly enough, the association of ‘hill tribes’ and ‘forest destruction’ has been an axiomatic discourse unquestioned by the Thai public, as if both are necessarily adjectives of each other. The unfortunate category of ‘hill tribe’ includes Karen. Despite the fact that the historical settlement of Karen people in the area now designated as Thailand can be traced back at least to the eighteenth century, their history is regarded as irrelevant while they are constantly accused and charged by government agencies as being forest encroachers. To understand how and why the Karen people have come to occupy a

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vulnerable position in relation to the modern Thai state, it is ﬁrst necessary to trace the events leading to the historical conjuncture when peripheral peoples became subsumed under the new category, ‘hill tribe’. I argue that the discourse about hill tribes is recently invented and reﬂects the changing relations between the Thai state and peripheral populations. Ethnic classiﬁcation is a type of technology of power employed by the modern Thai state (Keyes 1994). Although peripheral peoples (chao pa, literally, ‘jungle people’) were often categorized as uncivilized, non-Tai others in the pre-colonial period (Stott 1991; Thongchai 1994), their inferior place was located within the understanding of the Siamese elites and Northern Princes regarding their distinctive characteristics and practices as their ‘marginal subjects’ (Kammerer 1989). This understanding, however, has been lost in the process of inventing the new notion of ‘hill tribes’ and within the process of constructing a new modern state. Highland peoples have thus been (re)located in the new order of the modern Thai nation-state. In the case of the Karen, their long historical relationship with the Thai has left them in the ambiguous status of chao khao ‘hill tribe’. While their long historical existence in the area now called Thailand is recognized, their classiﬁcation as ‘hill tribe’ still renders them as non-citizen, alien other. In this categorization as ‘hill tribe’, the state has also constructed a new image of the Karen as a ‘benign’, ‘docile’ and ‘idle’ hill tribe as opposed to the ‘malign’, aggressive Hmong. Within the course of environmental conﬂicts, such representation of the Karen has also been (re)appropriated by the media, NGOs, and the Karen themselves. As the state’s endeavour to assert control over peripheral people has often been incomplete, the deployment of state power over the discourse of ‘hill tribe’ and the people so designated always includes tension and contestation. It is within such a context that the marginal position of the Karen has been negotiated.

Karen: peripheral peoples and their tributary places in pre-modern Siam Before the so-called problem of frontier security (panha khwam mankhong chaidaen) came into existence in modern Thai society, frontier people had never been given much political or economic attention by the Siamese state. At the time of the pre-modern state in Southeast Asia, when the political centres were found in the densely populated valleys of the Irrawady, Sittang, Chao Phraya, Mekhong, and Red Rivers among wet rice cultivators, frontier peoples generally were those who cleared the land in areas peripheral to those centres, in the deep forests and inaccessible valleys and mountains (Akin 1996; Tambiah 1976). Historically, Karen-speaking people have settled in the border areas between the old Yuan (northern Thai) and Siamese states since the estab-

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lishment of these states in the thirteenth century (Keyes 1979c: 31). Living along the rivers and mountain ranges on the ambiguous frontiers and in the buffer zone between pre-modern Siam and Burma, the Karen gained much of their subsistence by swidden agriculture. The Sgaw Karen lived mostly in the hills of the northern part of Siam, while the majority of the Pwo Karen resided in the forested foothills and mountains of western Siam. In the area which is presently called Kayah state between what is today Maehongson of Thailand and Toungoo of Burma resided the Taungthu and B’ghwe. These subgroups of Karen-speaking people were more or less interspersed among each other (Hamilton 1976b: 4). The Sgaw were the largest group and the most widely distributed (Marshall 1922: 1). These different groups of Karen speakers recognized no common identity ( Jørgensen 1998), and their languages were not mutually intelligible. Marshall notes that the term ‘Karen’ derives from various Burmese and Tai names used as collective derogatory terms for forest peoples (Marshall 1922). The central Tai people called this group of people ‘Kariang’, which Keyes suggests is a term derived from the Mon word ‘Kareang’ (1979c: 45). Khon Muang or northern Tai refer to the Karen-speaking people as Yang, e.g. Yang for Sgaw Karen and Yang Daeng for Karenni (ibid. 25).2 However, such terms were never used by the groups designated as ‘Karen’ themselves. Diverse Karen-speaking groups would call themselves by their own names, e.g. Pgagayaw for Sgaw Karen, Phloung for Pwo Karen and Pao for Taungthu. All of these terms mean ‘human beings’, in contrast to the derogatory names assigned to people living in the forest by the dominant valley people. Viewed as remote jungle people, Karen people were historically external to both Burma and Siam. Perhaps the Karen within the western border of Siam became more relevant to the Kingdom during the periods of warfare among the overlords of the region, when the marginal areas temporarily turned into strategic frontier towns, since it was people, not territory, that was the subject of interest of the warfare in those days (Thongchai 1994). It should be noted here that one of the characteristics of these peripheral polities was autonomy. Each could be under many overlords at one time. The pre-modern perception of loyalty was completely different from the perception of national loyalty in the late twentieth century Thai state. Unlike the centralized and absolute loyalty the modern Thai state demands from its peoples, the idea of loyalty in the traditional tributary relationship was based primarily on a mutual personal relationship between those who demanded tribute and those who provided it. The ruling state was obliged to provide protection to its tributaries in return for their allegiance. Furthermore, as Thongchai argues in his description of the overlapping margins of Siam and its adjacent kingdoms, multiple loyalties to several overlords among the peripheral minorities was common and accepted by the ruling states (Thongchai 1993: 97). Loyalty

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in this overlapping space was, therefore, always ﬂuid, ﬂuctuating according to the shifting power within the tributary relationships. At the same time, the submission of tiny tributaries did not prevent them from attempting to exercise autonomy by seeking potential protection from more than one powerful state. Within this web of tributary relations, Karen people were linked with the major lowland kingdoms through loose, symbiotic ties (Keyes 1979c; Stern 1979; Lehman 1979). Their position as a non-Tai ethnic minority, outside the realm of the Siamese kingdom, did not prevent them from enjoying a relatively independent status at the edges of the superior power. However, in certain parts of the border between Siam and Burma, the frontier area that could be a bridge for the enemy to invade, explicit loyalty was required. But to acquire loyalty, one also had to abide by the traditions of reciprocal relationships. The provision of gifts often served as a symbolic means to establish this relationship. The Yonok Chronicle described an event that took place in 1783 during the reign of the Kawila, the Prince of Chiang Mai who ruled the Lanna Kingdom, then under the dominion of Siam: Phraya Wachiraprakan then assigned Phraya Samlan and thirty serfs to give 40 ﬁne pieces of crockery as a gift to Yang Kaang Hua Taad, the guardian chief (nai dan) of the red Karen, persuading (them) to give allegiance (to the Lanna Kingdom) . . . Then Phraya Wachiraprakan wrote a letter and arranged 30 sets of ﬁne dishware coupled with a piece of silk cloth for Khun Michue to give as a gift to Kang Saeng Luang, the outpost Karen chief of the western bank of the Khong (Salween) River. Yang Kang Saeng Luang agreed to give obeisance. (Praya (1961), Yonok Chronicle : 452–453, author’s translation) During the reign of Prince Kawila, in which kep phak sai sa, kep kha sai muang (‘gather vegetables into baskets, gather subjects into domains’) was the most important policy with respect to strengthening the Lanna Kingdom, the strategic means of controlling peripheral polities was the initiation of autonomous tributary relationships (Saratsawadi 1996: 338–339). Tamnan Phun Muang Chiang Mai (Chiang Mai Chronicle) recorded an 1809 peace treaty between Prince Kawila and Faphau, the overlord of the Red Karen polity on the western side of Salween River, in which it was agreed that the Salween River would be the borderline between the Chiang Mai and Taungthu Karen polities, and a sacred ritual was performed. [They] slaughtered an ox and feasted, then divided the ox’s horn into two pieces. Muang Yang Daeng kept the ﬁrst piece while Muang Chiang Mai kept the latter. An oath was taken that the middle of Khong (Salween) River was the border [between Lanna and Karen

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states]. [If] the Khong River ﬂowed to the east, Chiang Mai took the advantage. If Khong [River] ﬂowed to the west, Yang Daeng took the advantage. If the [Khong River] ﬂowed to the middle, each took half of the share. As long as the Khong River did not go dry, the horn did not rot, and Tham Chang Phuak (White Elephant Cave) did not collapse, Muang Chiang Mai and Muang Yang Daeng would remain in friendship. (Tamnaan Phuenmuang Chiang Mai 1996: 115–116, author’s translation) The power of Lanna, which was visible to the peripheral states, was hence always ambiguous, ﬂuid, and boundary-less (Saratsawadi 1996: 338). Such traditional tributary relationships between the Red Karen polity and the Lanna Kingdom had long been established. Other Sgaw Karen who were persuaded by Prince Kawilla to move into Chiang Mai territory were also granted rights of usufruct in the land. As Marlowe notes, ‘It would appear that the Karen were at ﬁrst a semiautonomous, tributary, dependent people under the protection of the Princes of Chiang Mai’ (1969: 2). Their socio-political domain was ‘the extension of the realm of Muang’, not ‘an alien or alternate one’. The Karen people were ‘the holder of the wild for the sown’ (ibid.), and the ‘guardians of the forests for the valley state powers’ ( Jørgensen 1998). In this sense, Karen appeared in the history of the central state only in a speciﬁc context. Their existence is basically associated with the wild (pa) and with the war (suksongkhram). Karen on the western frontier also became signiﬁcant to the Siamese state during the early colonial encounter. In a reaction against British colonialism in the 1820s, Thai rulers, following established administrative procedures, appointed feudal chiefs (chao muang) in small principalities among such minority peoples as the Mon, Lawa, and Karen on the border with Tenesserim ( Jørgensen 1979: 84). In 1839, the chao muang of Sangkhlaburi was a Karen who was given the title Phra Srisuwankhiri (or Phra Suwan), which title was passed on through three more generations of Karen until Siam’s administrative reforms in the 1890s abolished the position (Stern 1979: 66–67). By 1866 two additional Karen chao muang − Phra Srisawat and Phra Mae Klong − were assigned to oversee the area of the Khwae River, a branch of the Mae Klong (ibid.). The ﬁrst administered the middle course of the river in what is today Kanchanaburi province, while the latter was responsible for the upper reaches of the Khwae Yai, in the area that today is southern Tak province. In 1892, Muang Sangkhlaburi was changed to Sangkhlaburi district, Kanchanaburi province, and the fourth Phra Srisuwankiri (whose Karen name was Tachiangproy) was assigned to the district as a district ofﬁcer. This last incumbent ﬁnally retired in 1924, thus ending the Karen line in this ofﬁce.

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The assignment of Karen to such high ranking position in the central Thai administrative system marked the ﬁrst time in Karen history that the Karen occupied a distinctive place in relationship to the Siamese Kingdom. From a very peripheral position, they suddenly became guardians of the frontiers (Thiphaakorawong 1965 II: 331–336). As Jørgensen (1979) argues, in this period the Siamese administration took care not to offend ‘the forest people’, wanting them to remain in Thailand. From 1850 on they were even exempted from paying tribute to the Siamese King. However, in the late nineteenth century when the modern concept of borders transformed Siam into a new ‘geo-body’ (Thongchai 1994), these peripheral peoples began to be viewed in a new way. As the edge of the Thai domain was no longer ambiguous but clearly bounded, a new system of identiﬁcation of Thai people had created a new identity not only for Thai people, but also for non-Tai minorities.

Constructing the wild: chao pa and their place in transitional Siam The modern borders of Siam were formed largely as a result of Siam’s involuntary role as a ‘buffer state’ during the Franco-British encounters in Burma, Indochina, and Malaya in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (Tapp 1990; Thongchai 1993, 1994). The former personal bondage of people to their lords was replaced by a territorial tie between the state and its people. The enforcement of new administrative structures in the centralizing process made territorial control increasingly important. This initially had a marginalizing impact on the peripheral people. In 1892, the British administration, driven by the massive value of teak forests along the Burmese and Thai borders, took over the thirteen peripheral Lanna States (hua muang), including the Ngiaw (also known as Tai Yai and Shan) and eastern Karen perimeters (Saratsawadi 1996: 341–349). The traditional boundaries between Lanna and peripheral states symbolized in the sacred ox’s horn as indicated in the Chiang Mai Chronicle were denied by the British, who argued that the claim was vague and that the Burmese could also make a similar claim. The loss of the northern periphery to the British and the western part of Mekhong to the French rendered it clear to the Siamese elite that the pre-modern non-territorial concept of national boundary was no longer applicable. The creation of the Thai geo-body within ﬁxed boundaries also made visible the people living at the edge of the new national boundary, who were forced to cease their practice of multiple loyalties. The state needed to know who these peoples were, questions which took place against the background of the construction of the new Thai national identity (Thongchai 1994: 169–174). As pa (forest), the non-Tai entity, has been gradually incorporated into a new spatial organization of the modern citystate, the uncivilized khon pa (wild people), the non-Thai ethnic category,

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has become a salient object of interrogation. The differentiation between the Thai and the non-Thai was a product of the racial construction of ‘Thainess’ by the Thai state at the end of the nineteenth century. The new sense of ‘Thainess’, as Streckfuss (1993) suggests, was created not only by the territorial demarcation of ‘Thailand’, but also by the adoption of the European idea of racial categorization by Bangkok elites. While racial homogeneity served as a form of resistance against European colonialism (ibid. 143), racial differences between the Thai and the non-Thai who lived in the marginal realm provided a basis for a reference point for the historical evolution of Thai civilization. Several ethnographic accounts of the ethnic classiﬁcation of khon pa, the wild man, were produced at the turn of the nineteenth century by Siamese scholars. Khon Pa Ru Kha Fainua (The Wildman or the Kha3 in the North) by Khun Pracha Khadikit and Waduai Chaopa Chat Tangtang (On the Varieties of Forest Races) by Chaophraya Surasakmontri were but two examples of the inﬂuence of the new racial thinking and ﬁxed national boundary ideologies (Thongchai 1993). As Chaophraya Surasakmontri (1961: 226, author’s translation) describes the characteristics of khon pa: Such various races reside on the periphery. . . . These people like to live in the forest and mountain distant from the cities, but do not settle down in one particular place. [They] often move their families and roam around in other forests. Even though the country has shared with and fed these various racial peoples, they have never accepted these gratuities extended for the own sake of their own progress. [They] just naturally escape to the mountainous forests. In Khon Pa Ru Kha Fainua, khon pa was deﬁned as ‘a kind of khon doem (native), who remains in the jungles and mountains’. These groups of peoples ranged from Lawa and Yang to the varieties of Kha such as Khamu, Kha Meo (Hmong), Muser (Lahu) and Phi Pa (literally, ‘forest ghost’, generally called Phi Tong Luang − ’yellow banana leaf ghost’ in Thai), and were viewed taxonomically from ‘more civilized’ to less civilized ‘wild man’. Not only were the marginal khon pa constructed as the strange, ﬁlthy, and uncivilized Other in contrast to the Thai, but the realm of pa, the dangerous wild frontier outside the town, essentially drew a line that separated the Thai from the ‘wild others’. However, the dichotomy of muang/pa also relied on how unfamiliar a given group seemed to the central Thai, from the Thai elites’ perspective. Hence the Lue and the Shan, though settled in the northernmost borders of Siam like other ethnic groups, were not considered khon pa because ‘they are actually like the Lao, or Thai people like us’ (Phraya Pracha Khadikit 1885, also see Thongchai Winichakul 1993: 11). The Karen, despite their relatively close contact with the Thai, were still

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classiﬁed as khon pa by the Thai. In Nangsu Akkhraphithansap (Dictionary of the Siamese Language), printed early in the reign of King Rama V, Karen were deﬁned as ‘Khon chaopa (wild people) with top-knots who dress like the Mon’ (Bradley 1873, cited in Muang Boran 1993: 8). Although they lived in the mountainous forests like other non-Thai wild peoples, this type of khon pa was considered ‘superior to the kha’ (Bradley 1971: 165) due to their historically closer relationship with the Thai, while other kinds of kha were placed in different types of ‘real wild’ (pa thae) categories according to their hair, clothes, houses, plants, food, weapons, and ‘special characteristics’. The discourse of cleanliness based on the modern notion of hygiene was also used to determine the degree of civilization. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the dichotomy of civilized/uncivilized had become a product of modern thought within the Thai nationstate. This division was informed by an evolutionary understanding of the connection between pa and muang. Hence, ‘wild’ came to represent the historical past of the muang which had long since gone on their path towards civilization. ‘Wild people’, then, were ‘isolated remnants . . . left behind by the southward tribal movements of the past ages’, peoples who ‘have remained in the hills’, and persisted ‘in the absence of the later civilizing inﬂuences. [They have] retained to the present day much of their original primitive state’ (Graham 1912: 104). They were ‘the original inhabitants’ (khon dangdoem), who ‘remain in the jungles and mountains’ (Phraya Pracha Khadikit 1885: 164). In the early twentieth century, the modern Thai state was made more centralized and bureaucratized. The question of what it meant to be a Thai national and how that status could be achieved prevailed throughout the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century. In the post-World War II decade, the tide of ‘Cold War’ sentiment gradually swept through Burma and Indochina. The rise of nationalist ideology within the Thai state heightened concern about the border. As a consequence, ethnic differences between muang and pa came to be seen as a threat to Thai nationhood. The perception of forest people now underwent a signiﬁcant shift, this time from being viewed as strange and uncivilized to being seen as ungovernable. The construction of Thai nationalist ideology in the modern Thai state, where assimilation became the ﬁrst and foremost strategic tool for dealing with a heterogeneous society, forced marginal hill peoples, including the Karen, to come to terms with a new category, that of chao khao (hill tribes).

(Re)constructing bordering peoples: Karen and the invention of chao khao (hill tribes) As the terms khon pa and chao pa receded in signiﬁcance in the early twentieth century, the term chao khao was introduced into the dominant discourse about people on the border. State concern about ethnic

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highlanders, notes Likhit, followed the ﬁrst survey of ‘hill tribes’ by the Siam Society in 19204 (Likhit 1978: 64). However, the new discourse of ‘hill tribes’, which began to evolve in the 1920s and has been used ever since, was not made ofﬁcial until 1959. As Wanat (1989: 229) remarks, the term ‘hill tribes’ (chao khao), referring to the minorities residing in the highlands, was given ofﬁcial status in 1959 as a consequence of the formation of the Central Hill Tribe Committee (CHTC), which replaced the previous Hill Tribe Welfare Committee. Following the establishment of this committee, a Tribal Research Centre at Chiang Mai was initiated as a result of the recommendation of a consultant, Hans Manndrof, an Austrian anthropologist. Research on hill tribes started from this time on, with the major funding coming from international donors such as SEATO and UNESCO. Originally, the aim of the research of this Centre was to provide a sound basis for the extension to the hill areas of educational and welfare services and measures for the economic improvement of the peoples of the areas. This policy also marked an initial step in the assimilation of the peripheral hill people into Thai culture. The term chao khao has a double meaning. Its literal meaning is ‘hill’ or ‘mountain people’. However, when placed in a punning manner with the term chao rao (‘us people’), the term acts as a binary opposition in its other meaning of ‘them people’. In ofﬁcial usage, the term is problematic, since it is inconsistently and differently deﬁned among different agencies. Likhit Theerawekhin, drawing on a senior Border Patrol Police ofﬁcial’s notion, gave the following deﬁnition of chao khao: [They are] minorities who have settled in the hill areas under 10,000 feet above sea level; having similar traditional customs, spoken languages, beliefs, occupations and habits among each other, sharing common administrative systems [with the Thai], but obviously distinct in terms of customs and spoken languages. And [they] believe in animism. (Likhit Theerawekhin 1978: 68; author’s translation, emphasis added) The ofﬁcial discourse on ‘hill tribes’ clearly lumps every group of highlanders under the same category, regardless of their distinctive cultural identities and histories. Thus the Karen, who perceive their own places as not being within the highland sphere and who feel no afﬁnity with hill people of the higher slopes, are put into the same gross ethnic category as other highland tribes (Kammerer 1989: 262). It should be noted that in the Cold War climate in which nationalist ideology was intensiﬁed, the dichotomy of pa/muang (wild/city) produced partly by the discourse about khon pa was polarized into a highland/ lowland or hill/valley opposition by the discourse concerning hill tribes. This differentiation did not come from the self-deﬁnitions of the hill or the valley peoples, in which similarity as well as contrast with others is recognized. It emerged, rather, out of the state’s (re)conceptualization of the

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border peoples in relation to the dominant lowlanders in Cold War terms. Viewed this way, ‘hill tribes’ does not simply refer to people living in the mountains as the term literally implies. In contemporary usage, the concept is used for nine ethnic minorities – the Karen, Hmong, Lisu, Akha, Lahu, Yao, Kamu, H’tin, and Lua − even though some of the peoples classiﬁed as Lua and Karen are no longer mountain dwellers (Vienne 1989: 36). In fact, some Karen have long settled down in lowland areas. On the other hand, other ethnic groups who also live in mountainous areas, such as Khon Muang, Haw Chinese, Shan, are excluded. In some ofﬁcial accounts, such as that of the National Security Council, chao khao are reduced into only six tribes by leaving out the Kamu, H’tin, and Lua (Khachadpai 1983: 66).5 Generally, government documents of the Cold War era divided ‘hill tribes’ into two major groups − the early and the late migrants into Thailand (Khachadpai 1995). Karen were considered to be a people who ‘migrated into Thailand before the Thai’ (ibid. 67). However, such acknowledgement did not grant the Karen a different status from other ‘hill tribes’. In Thai publications, the Karen were often portrayed as wild, characterized by their being ‘shy and awkward, not astute as other tribes . . . [They] don’t submit themselves to external inﬂuence to change their traditional custom’ (Ofﬁce of Secretary of National Psychological Operations − OSNCPO 1974: 79).6 It should be noted that despite the fact that the type of agriculture Karen people practice might not be much different from that of other upland Thai, chao khao are not considered upland farmers (chao rai ). This is due to the fact that the term ‘hill tribes’ does not refer simply to groups of ethnic highland minorities possessing distinctive cultures or practising particular types of cultivation, but rather has a quite speciﬁc geo-political implication. As the Border Patrol Police’s definition of chao khao implies, the place of hill tribes is outside the realm of ‘the owner of the country’ (ibid. 67). They are non-Thai minorities who reside within Thai national territory, and their way of life poses a sensitive problem for the Thai nation. The rhetoric of khon pa in the pre-colonial-era state was profoundly altered by the advent of that of chao khao in the modern era. The tacit recognition of the pre-modern state’s hill/valley distinction, which enabled the mountain minorities to come to terms with the powerful valley-dwellers in asymmetrical reciprocal relationships, was absent in the term chao khao (Kammerer 1989: 286). While both discourses, khon pa and chao khao, signify the subordination of the wild primitive to the dominant Thai, the former allowed the peripheral peoples to retain an identity different from those of the centre (ibid.). The state rhetoric of chao khao, on the contrary, implies a need for mechanisms of control. Hill peoples consequently ﬁnd little place within the life of the nation, particularly as the term itself has come to denote socio-political deviance from Thai society within the ‘them-us’ dichotomy. In an article written by a prominent

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columnist of Thai Rath newspaper, Doi Dokphin (Mountain of poppy ﬂowers), the results of a ‘development’ programme introduced to the Karen at Ban Mae Haw, Mae Sariang district, Mae Hong Son province were presented as so disappointing that ‘Over the 10 years since the establishment of the Hill Tribe Centre for Development and Welfare, 27 households [of Mae Ho village] still remain chao khao’ (Thai Rath, 17 November 1973). Doi Dokphin continued, ‘There seems to be no promising sign that the chao khao way of life has changed into chao rao at all’ (ibid.). The signs of chao khao − the ‘them people’ – were described as consisting of ‘houses remaining in dull and dark style’, ‘villagers still not liking to take a bath’ and ‘strong animist beliefs’ (ibid.). The sense of ‘otherness’ of the realm outside of the Thai nation is also believed by government agencies to be embedded in the unequal relationship between the Thai and the hill tribes. As one government document proposed, the way to reach the goal of ‘no hill tribes but only Thai’ is to study the complex components of ‘the distinctive racial recognition among the Karen, racial contempt among the Thai towards the hill tribes, the unequal “development” received by the hill tribes as compared to that of the Thai, and the destruction of national economic resources such as forests by hill tribes for their survival’ (Ofﬁce of the Secretary of National Psychological Operations 1974: 86). How has the distinction of ethnic identiﬁcation, the we/they division, become politicized? Why has the position of the hill people become much more problematic in the modern era than it was in the premodern period? The answer seems to lie primarily in the impact of the politicization of space in which the changing state notions with regard to ‘border’ and ‘elevation’ have become a signiﬁcant marker in differentiating Thai from non-Thai citizens. In this sense, while ‘border’ is associated with national security, ‘elevation’ has become the key to the country’s ecological integrity. Cultural distinctiveness has been made problematic to the nation’s imagined homogeneity. Border and elevation function as a ‘territorial imperative’. The notion of the bounded territorial nation-state and the ﬁxed division of high/low have been perceived as cultural homogeneity or the perception thereof, and have become a signiﬁcant tool for national integration and territorial consolidation. During the formative process of the modern state, the border, a line of demarcation between two sovereign nations, came to serve also as marker of a common culture, language, and social and political organization among people within the same boundary (Rajah 1989). The cultural distinctiveness of the peoples in the highlands has become a sign that the boundary demarcation and the nation’s imagined homogeneity remain incomplete. In particular, assumptions about national security produced by a discourse regarding borders has turned cultural differences into signs of the putative disloyalty and unlawfulness of the hill peoples.

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Assimilation has been put forward by the state as a means to resolve ethnic and cultural dissimilarity. Four decades of the enforcement of an assimilationist policy has, however, failed to solve the so-called panha chao khao (hill tribe problem). The present image of the ‘hill tribes’ is still based on the view that the practice of upland swidden cultivation is linked with opium production and, subsequent to government ‘development’ efforts, cabbage plantations. This view ﬁnds expression in stereotypes that have now become unquestioned truths. As Vienne (1989: 36) puts it, ‘To be Karen, to be Hmong, to be Akha . . . is more or less to be credited with a predictable pattern of behaviour embedded in a stereotyped cultural pattern promoted as an idealized rationalization which stands in contrast to the dominant society.’ And it is within the discourse of ‘hill tribes’ that this stereotyped ideology has been reinforced. So long as this discourse persists, this normative ideology will continue to preserve and perpetuate the ideological categorization of hill peoples as a major problem and a major threat to the dominant society, although what is highlighted as the source of the major threat may vary from time to time. Furthermore, distinctive groups of ‘hill tribes’ are perceived as posing different degrees of a ‘problem’. Within the production of the ‘hill tribe problem’, which concept serves as the state’s rhetorical device in controlling the hill people and maintaining the illegitimacy of their place within the nation, Karen people have found themselves caught up in a new web of problems – ‘hill tribe problems’ comprising national security, forest conservation, and opium production.

Karen and the hill tribe problem (panha chao khao) In a meeting called to consider ‘hill tribes and national security problems’, Prasong Sunsiri, the former Secretary of the National Security Council, announced that the current practices of hill peoples had affected every aspect of national security, ranging from political, military, and economic to socio-psychological (1986: 15). Migratory behaviour, opium growing, and shifting cultivation were marked as the three most dangerous threats posed by ‘hill tribes’ − all needing to be urgently controlled and suppressed in order to maintain the security of the entire nation. Kammerer, in her study of the ‘territorial imperatives’ imposed on Akha identity, states that of all the elements comprising the panha chao khao, the insurgent image is the most dangerous as it has often led to the use of force by the government against highland people (1988: 77). Tapp also argues that the efﬁcacy of the new notion of territorialism − the idea of borders and the sovereignty of the nation-state − has created new perceptions regarding national identiﬁcation as this concept pertains to the movements of people across borders (1990: 149–150). The emergence of ‘refugees’ and ‘illegal immigrants’ produced by the insistence on the inviolability of borders has inﬂuenced the dominant Thai view of ethnic

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minorities in the zones near borders. During the Cold War period in the mid-twentieth century, state anti-communism turned the Thai borders into a strategically sensitive arena. The Border Patrol Police (BPP) was established in 1953 with the support of the United States Operations Mission (USOM), with the aim of maintaining security and gathering intelligence in remote frontier regions. Its mission also included the setting-up of an upland school project in 1955 and intensive surveys and establishment of contacts with hill villages, as well as the training of hill peoples as village guards forming border security volunteer teams in conjunction with the Communist Suppression Operations Command (CSOC) (Tapp 1989: 32; 1990: 154). Within the BPP’s policies towards hill peoples and the discourse of insurgency, Hmong people were singled out as the major ‘threat’ to national security under the ‘Red Meo’ model.7 Of the six minorities deﬁned as chao khao, the Karen were the earliest settlers in the mountains of Thailand. Kammerer argues that the recognition of such historical presence has won the Karen more benign treatment by state agencies (1988: 76). While the border security panic and the state fears of highland insurrection as the impact of communist expansion has primarily targeted Hmong,8 the Karen have rarely come up in the rhetoric of fears of political rebellion. If, however, one were to believe that the recognizable ‘kin’ and ‘indigenous’ status of the Karen has made them a distinctive ‘hill tribe’ outside state surveillance of insurgency, one would risk underestimating the power/efﬁcacy of the discourse about ‘hill tribes’. During the 1960s–1970s, a number of Karen in the west as well as the north felt compelled to join the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) due to random attacks on Karen villages by the Thai military (Pinkaew 1996a). One of the strongest CPT insurgent strongholds was in Umphang district, Tak province, where the major forces came from ﬁfteen Karen villages in Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary.9 A BPP unit was set up in 1982 in Mae Chanta village, Umphang district, in order to ‘tame’ the rebellious Karen and compel them to submit to Thai authority. The BPP continued to be suspicious about the possibility of Karen insurgency, and the suspicions were realized when the BPP base was attacked by a group of Karen in the dawn of 9 November 1992. This assault was a response to the abusive action of a group of BPP who allegedly destroyed Karen Buddhist shrines three times after accusing the Karen of practising a deviant religious cult. The ambush resulted in the death of ﬁve BPP police and six Karen. Throughout the week of searches and arrests, the Karen were portrayed by the BPP and media as a rebellious hill tribe whose action was associated with their previous involvement with the CPT and a vicious religious cult which was believed to ‘have turned the gentle Karen into ﬁerce people armed with knives and guns, ready to attack state authorities’ (Bangkok Post, 7 February 1993). It should be noted that within the discourse of insurgency with which the Karen were deﬁned, Karen historical existence was recognized but

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deliberately ignored. Karen therefore sought to reclaim their forgotten place within the history and present of Thai society, and to be accepted as members of Thai society. I agree with Rajah (1989) in his argument that Karen self-identity in Thailand has been strongly inﬂuenced by the very existence of the Thai nation-state in which the Karen people have resided for many centuries. It is the particular locality inhabited by Karen villagers and their historical relationship within Thai society that is the source/site of self-identiﬁcation. Thongchai (1994) also holds that the Karen on the Thai border with Burma perceived themselves as Thai Karen even before the demarcation of Thailand’s boundary. Unfortunately, such self-identiﬁcation has often been downplayed by the state discourse about ‘hill tribes’. Even though disloyalty and rebelliousness have been assigned as a signiﬁcant characteristic of ‘hill tribes’, in general the source of such characteristics and the ways in which such characteristics play out are seen as different for different ‘hill tribe’ groups. While the Hmong are perceived as being ‘aggressive’ by ‘nature’, the Karen are seen as ‘isolated’, ‘non-ambitious’, ‘poor’, ‘shy’, ‘clumsy’, and ‘peace-loving’ (Seri 1963: 81–82; Ofﬁce of the Secretary of National Psychological Operations 1974: 79). The violent attack of the Karen in Mae Chanta was therefore considered as unusual and related to the millennial cult of a few aggressive Karen.

Karen and the changing relationship between upland and lowland Historically, the relationship between Karen and Tai has been one of the elements characterizing the livelihood of the north and western border areas. In the political realm, Karen entered into tributary relationship with the Tai lords in return for protection. In the socio-economic realm, Karen participated in the lowland economy as early as the logging period of the late nineteenth century. In the 1880s, Hallet (1890: 40–41) noted that most of the elephants working in the teak forests were owned by Karen, who hired them out to foresters at the rate of 50–70 rupees per month. Teak extraction was so signiﬁcant that many Karen shifted their settlements and agricultural sites from primary forests to secondary forests where teak concessions were operating (Grandstaff 1980). Thus, trade in forest products linked upland Karen and lowland Tai together. At the inter- and intra-village level, highland-lowland interdependence can be traced back to the history of siao (a term used in the northern and northeastern dialects literally meaning friendship, or ﬁctive kinship) and the tradition of kan liang sat pha ku’ng (a type of animal husbandry in which the offsprings of the animals raised were shared equally between the owners and the caretakers) practised by the Karen and Khon Muang in many areas for more than three generations. In a siao relationship, lowlanders would hire upland people to raise cattle and buffaloes for them,

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for which the latter would receive young calves: the ﬁrst calf would go to the caretaker, the second to the owner, switching back and forth until the mother cow died. For lowlanders, trips to visit the cattle were also trips to visit their upland friends, as well as chances to enjoy game hunting and gathering. Contact between highland and lowland people also included trade. Throughout the history of their relationship with lowlanders hill people literally walked downhill to exchange their products for necessary items. Each group had something the other needed. While the forest people needed salt, iron, and prestige goods, many forest products which the valley people needed came from upland forests. Historically, trading with uplanders for forest products was essential to the running of lowland polities. At the same time, access to valuable forest products provided uplanders with a bargaining position in their contact with lowlanders ( Jonsson 1998: 20). Today, trading of goods between the two groups still exists but takes place at local markets. Although highland and lowland peoples have historically been interdependent, this does not necessarily imply that there has been no conﬂict between the two groups. In fact, the relationship between hill people and lowland inhabitants has always been unequal. Nevertheless, the symbiosis between the groups continues, with an implicit understanding of cultural and social differences. Indeed, before state intervention in the periphery and before the exacerbation of ethnic prejudice/intolerance by nature conservationists, the notion of ethnic identiﬁcation had never been politicized and any difference between highlanders and lowlanders were taken simply as instances of cultural disjuncture by lowland communities. Within contemporary conservation politics, the politicization of ethnic conﬂicts has not only swept away, both culturally and in practice, the upland-lowland relationship, but has also cut apart the connection between these two polities. Complex ethnic relations have been transformed into a monolithic view of resource competition between uplanders and lowlanders. At the same time, the position and image of upland minorities are judged by preconceived ideas regarding the relationship each group has with natural resources. In this context, the Karen have entered into a more complex political ambience of ethnic labelling.

The ‘benign/submissive savage’: the representation of the Karen within environmental discourses One of the prevalent characteristics of state as well as public discourses about ‘hill tribes’ in the late twentieth century is the binary opposition between ‘malign/aggressive’ and ‘benign/submissive’ ﬁgures. Over the past decade, such a binary opposition has been constantly reinforced within both ofﬁcial and public discourses about hill tribes in Thailand. This stereotyping strategy has not only fortiﬁed ideas of the different kinds of ‘strangeness’ among different groups of ‘hill tribes’ but also

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served as a rhetoric of control by setting up a new standard of labelling. The name ‘Hmong’ has come to mean ‘aggressive’, and therefore subject to being tamed and normalized. At the same time, ‘Karen’ has acquired the meaning of ‘submissive’, who is ‘peaceful’ but ‘backward’ and ‘pitiful’. It is therefore not simply that the Karen are taken by the Thai as ‘akin and indigenous’ as ‘their agricultural methods are familiar and their settlements reassuringly stable’ (Kammerer 1988: 76). I argue that the representation and stereotyping of Karen-Hmong as benign-malign hill tribes by government agencies and the Thai media has racial functions. The contrasting ‘good and bad’ guy model serves the Thai ideology concerning the preferable type of ‘proper’ hill tribe. To be a good hill tribe, one must be inferior to and docile in interaction with the Thai, open to ‘development’ and willing to become ‘civilized’ Thai citizens. The bad type of hill tribe is the one that attempts to cross the line of inferiority, thus deserving punishment. In a conﬂict between Hmong and lowland people over forest management in Mae Soi, in Chiang Mai’s Chomthong district (a dispute which has carried on for almost a decade), the exercise of the ideology underlying the docile versus rebellious dichotomy is striking. A Bangkok Post journalist noted in his newspaper article, that the blame for forest destruction and water shortages often targets the Hmong rather than the Karen (Bangkok Post, 29 July 1997). [I]t is not just because the Karens terrace paddy ﬁelds in the valley while Hmongs clear watershed forests areas for cultivation. . . . It’s probably because the Hmongs are getting richer than the lowland farmers. Traditionally, the lowland farmers have looked down on the minority tribes. Now, the tables are turned. No wonder there is tension. . . . In Baan Pakluay, [Hmong people] buy pickup truck, deposit cash in banks and buy longan orchards. The money comes from the sale of cabbages and ﬂowers. . . . Now, the formerly migrant minorities are building an increasing number of permanent houses and are farming larger areas, including watershed forest areas. While the Hmong are resented because of their competition with the Thai, the Karen are pitied as they are ‘poor and hardly have anything to eat’ (ibid.). As Suchira Prayulpitak, the spokesperson of Dhammanaat, an urban middle-class conservation group that supports the Chomthong lowlanders in their conﬂict with the Hmong puts it, ‘[P]oor Karens work for the Hmongs, even in the encroached ﬁelds. It is they who risk arrest, not their Hmong employers’ (Bangkok Post, 17 July 1997). However, such sympathy is inconsistent and only lasts as long as the Karen remain within their designated stereotype. Once they attempt to rebel against their destitute and subservient position, the Karen are also condemned as being another ‘strong-headed/stubborn hill tribe’. In

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stressing resettlement as the only solution to forest preservation, the fate of the Karen was epitomized in the judgement of the Dhammanaat spokesperson. ‘But the Karen community is currently turning to the same farming techniques as the Hmong, so I don’t believe they can live in harmony with the forest’ (The Nation, 9 May 1997). It might be true that the historical relationship that the Karen had with the Thai has lent the Karen a distinctive position as a ‘benign’ hill tribe. However, such a position is closely linked to the politics of remembering the past in which the ‘submissive’ characteristics of the Karen were constituted. But whenever Karen people attempt to trespass that ﬁxed past, their position then becomes vulnerable. In the discourse of ‘hill tribe’, the ambiguous position of the Karen as neither full ‘citizens’ of Thailand nor totally ‘alien others’ as noted by Keyes (1979c: 53) two decades ago still prevails even today. It is interesting to note that over the past decade of alarming environmental degradation in Thailand as a result of extensive industrialized development, the ‘benign’ nature of the Karen has also appeared in Thai media and NGO accounts as an idealistic model of nature preserver. Ofﬁcial perceptions of the Karen as docile and country bumpkins have been turned into an image of modest and humble Karen who live in harmony with nature. The author of a colourful feature on the Pwo Karen in Kanchanaburi in Decade (1993 v.20: 111–112), a feature magazine, writes: ‘I notice that Karen communities have profound reverence for nature’, and ‘Even though the tide of city-culture has penetrated the village, the Karen way of life remains native.’ Another piece on the Karen in the same publication by another writer notes, ‘Nature conservation academics who had previously hoped to teach the Karen had to be their students in order to learn the real path of being genuine nature conservationists’ (Decade 1992 v.10: 56). Not only has the Karen way of life been seen as an alternative philosophy to urban consumptive greed, but their representation as being in ‘harmony with nature’ provides a basis for the supporters of people–forest co-existence. In a commentary entitled ‘Finding solutions to war is not easy’ on 30 April 1998, the assistant editor of the Bangkok Post, Sanitsuda Ekachai writes: [H]ill people can play an important role in rehabilitating our denuded mountains. Many hill people already are doing exactly that. The Karen’s rotation farm system has proven ecological. Their traditional zoning system also reveals this indigenous people’s knowledge of nature and environmental management. Along similar lines, The Nation’s commentator, Chang Noi, explains that Karen people ‘survive on a mix of permanent rice ﬁelds, rotating swiddens and gathering from the forest. They know how important the forests above their villages are for the water on which their rice depends.

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They manage the forests with considerable care because they depend so much on them’ (The Nation, 9 May 1997). Fink (1994: 60), commenting on her work among the Pwo in northern Thailand, notes that the twin conﬂation of peaceful livelihood with nature and peaceful livelihood with people are often found in media accounts, while the Karen disparagement of overt violence reinforces this image. The Karen play up this image of harmony not only to prevent state intervention (ibid.), but also to reclaim their right to coexist with protected forests. In the Northern Farmers’ Network’s campaign against the resettlement of hill people, the Karen rotational farming system’s relation to forest preservation has been highlighted as an ecologically sound model of nature–culture coexistence, despite the fact that almost half of the Karen members of the Network actually engage in the non-rotational cash-cropping of ﬂowers, carrots, and potatoes. This strategy represents what Susan Wright (1998) calls ‘the politicization of culture’,10 in which ‘culture’ has been utilized as a political tool by the minority people in negotiating their co-existence with the dominant society. This strategy appears to the Karen to be an effective resource for representing themselves as a tribe with an ecologically concerned way of life. The advocacy of the ‘Karen environmental ethic’ has made the Sgaw Karen proverb, ‘To drink from streams, we must protect streams; to eat from forests, we must protect forests’ a familiar phrase found in both Thai and English language newspapers (see for instance The Nation, 9 May 1997; Krungthep Thurakit, 4 March 1997). Such an ‘ethic’ has been praised by some government ofﬁces such as the Ofﬁce of the National Culture Committee which awarded the 1996 ‘Good Fellow of the Society’ prize11 to Joni Odochao, the former chair of the Northern Farmers’ Network and the most prominent advocate of Karen ‘culture’. Nevertheless, the playing-up of the romanticized idea of nature caretaker by the Karen is not taken up so easily by forestry ofﬁcials and nature conservationist groups. In an article by Oy Kanjanavanit, the secretarygeneral of the Green World Foundation, a Bangkok-based nature conservation organization, the espousal of a Karen ‘conservation’ ethic was rebutted (The Nation, 22 May 1995). Oy strongly asserts that what the Karen have tried to do is simply to mimic the structure of a real forest as closely as possible . . . But the hard truth is that [Karen] agroforestry can never replace the true functions of natural forest, no matter how good [sic] it is done. Even the most diversed [sic] Karen’s community forest − the likes of which is extremely rare − can only represent just a tiny fraction of natural biodiversity. This leads her to conclude that ‘In certain areas, like watershed ridges, where the efﬁciency of the natural ecosystem cannot be compromised, resettlement is necessary’ (ibid.).

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As the politics of conservation have come to dominate the fate of the highlands and its inhabitants, the manipulation of the essentialist image of Karen as ‘benign environmentalists’ has also had to confront complex situations. On the one hand, the use of this image risks the setback of its constructed ‘traditional environmentalist’ image. Without problematizing/redeﬁning the constructed term ‘tradition’, the advocates of ‘Karen tradition’ often ﬁnd themselves caught up in an unsolvable debate of past and present, e.g. ‘Karen tradition was good but that was history. The present Karen tradition has changed and become destructive’ (see also Lohmann 1999: 17). On the other hand, playing up the image of ‘harmony with nature’ without problematizing the dominant idea of ‘nature’ in the ﬁrst place also put the Karen at risk of being chased into a corner of the bio-centric argument of real/pure and unreal/impure ‘nature’ in which Karen habitat can never qualify as ‘real’ nature. Such a dilemma is not easy to break through. Perhaps the pursuit of a recognized position within Thai society requires a deeper and more radical struggle through which Karen livelihood and their relationship to their natural surroundings can be dynamically deﬁned.

The shifting past, present, and future In his explanation of how the politics of indigenous minorities in Burma are closely linked to the emergence of the concept of the modern nationstate, Keyes (1994: 4) maintains: The drawing of boundaries of modern nation-states has, in all instances, led to the incorporation within those boundaries of peoples with diverse cultural practices. Modern states have deployed other technologies of power–censuses, gazetteers, and most signiﬁcantly . . . ethnic categorization – as means to determine the characteristics of the subjects of the state. By tracing the historical construction of ‘hill tribes’, one can see how the dominant perceptions of peripheral peoples had long been inconsistent and changeable. From the position of ‘insigniﬁcant other’ outside the realm of the pre-modern state, the Karen have been relocated by the invented discourse of ‘hill tribes’ to a vulnerable position in relation to the modern Thai state. The shift from keeper of the frontier to backward hill tribe has situated the Karen within the most inferior position in the history of Karen–Thai relations. The birth of the modern Thai state and its nationalist ideology has also created a situation of increasing inequality between hill dwellers and valley majorities, while decreasing the chances of integration into national cultures, economies and political systems. At the same time, while the three myths of insurgent, opium producer, and forest destroyer have continued

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to characterize and shape the way hill people are perceived by the state, the last myth in particular has become a major arena of intense control and potential contestation over ethnic identiﬁcation. Far from being a force emanating from the centre and controlling every feature of ethnic identity, discourses about ‘hill tribes’ represent an open arena constantly challenged and used by hill people as well as other social groups. It should be noted that the aggravation of environmental tensions over the past decade has also allowed more room for political expression on the part of marginalized Karen, and more possibilities for politicized roles for other social agents. The late twentieth century has seen the increasing contestation of the Karen against state domination, challenging the view that sees power as emanating unidirectionally from the top. The emergence of the Northern Farmers’ Network, the majority of the members of which are Karen, and its advocacy of the Karen ways of life and systems of resource management have reinserted the existence and images of the Karen into the media and thus into Thai society. Such images are present in many forms, ranging from the romanticized image of peace-loving, unambitious forest preserver promoted by print media and NGOs, to manifestly political actions such as protests. These responsive actions represent the constant efforts of the Karen to sustain their ethnic identity within Thai society in a changing politico-economic environment. In addition, conﬂicting forces of other social groups, such as those between the urban-based nature conservationists and community rights activists are signiﬁcant factors that have shaped Karen struggle for their position within Thai society. It is within the complexity of diverse forces engaging in the contested arenas of ‘hill tribes’ discourse that the marginal place of the Karen has been negotiated. The history of the social construction of ‘hill tribes’ within the framework of modern state–hill minorities relationships is, thus, not a product of a ﬁxed imposed structure, but a dynamic process whereby people have given and continue to give meanings to their world and their actions in it.

Notes 1 Personal communication with staff at the Northern Development Foundation, February 1999. 2 Suriya Rattakul (1995: xiii) notes that the term Yang has more pejorative implications than Kariang as it has often been used by northern Tai to mean stupid and clumsy. For example, soe muan yang ‘as stupid as a Yang’. 3 While kha (falling tone) means subjects, slave, or bondman, kha (low tone) was applied by the Siamese to all sundry hill peoples in Northern Siam (Graham 1912: 111; Thai Dictionary 1980). 4 The Siam Society was established in 1904 with the objectives of ‘investigation and encouragement of Arts, Science, and Literature in relation to Siam and neighboring countries’ ( Journal of the Siam Society 1969: III). The main readers and writers of this twice-yearly publication are upper-class Thai and foreign

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6

7 8

9

10

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scholars. Four languages are used in this journal: Thai, English, French, and German. In 1920, the Siam Society set up a Sub-committee on Anthropology, Ethnographical and Linguistic Research. The Sub-committee prepared a questionnaire with a list of questions on the physical characteristics of the hill people, their material culture, economics, social organization, art, science and religion, as well as a list of vocabulary in various minority languages, and sent out some 250 copies to provincial authorities as well as to Thai residents in various parts of the country. The result of this survey were published in the Journal of the Siam Society. This project was the ﬁrst step in studying the nonThai ethnic minorities in Thailand according to scientiﬁc ethnological methods (Patya 1963). The reason is related to the ofﬁcial concern about communist insurgency, the narcotics trade, and watershed integrity, which led the state authorities to put emphasis on the ethnic groups believed to be involved in these three problems. One of the most signiﬁcant state publications on ‘hill tribes’ was a book titled The Karen Hilltribe published by the Ofﬁce of the Secretary of National Psychological Operations in 1974. This book was produced as part of a research project by the students of the 18th class of the School of Psychological Warfare. Psychological operations was one of the most signiﬁcant foci of the Thai military mission in the suppression/prevention of communist expansion during the 1960s. ‘Hill tribes’ were considered as not only physically and culturally different but, more importantly, psychologically different. This was believed to be due partly to ‘the difference in terms of geography, economics, religion, and historical heritage’. It was also believed that since ‘hill tribes’ live in ‘remote, inaccessible areas, they were likely to be inclined towards the instigation of the opposition to turn against the government’ (Ofﬁce of the Secretary of the National Committee on Psychological Operations 1974: I). As Nuan Hinchiranantana indicates in the Preface to The Karen Hilltribe, the purposes of the book were to provide ‘basic intelligence information’ for ‘ofﬁcials dealing with hill tribes to be able to study and understand the background of hill people and the news with regard to the precarious conditions of the hill tribes’ and ‘to pull the misguided back to be on the same side with the government’. A term used by Thai government in referring to Hmong people who joined the Communist Party of Thailand in the jungle in the 1970s. In Thailand’s Hill Tribes, written by General Prapas Charusathira, the Minister of Interior and Chairman of Hill Tribes Welfare Committee in the 1960s, the Hmong were presented as the group contributing to the most ‘tribal problem’ (panha chao khao). As General Prapas put it, ‘The tribe of most immediate political importance is probably the Miao (Hmong). They occupy the most remote and mountainous parts of the border region. They are the most migratory of all the groups. They have been the most involved in opium growing and therefore must be most subject to economic redirection with the opportunities it will provide for malicious misrepresentation’ (Prapas 1966: 5–6). Personal communication with Veerawat Theeraprasat, the former chief of Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary, 12 September 1996. According to Veerawat, this Karen and Hmong-based stronghold was never defeated by the Thai military. In ‘The Politicization of Culture’ Susan Wright (1998) explores three different ﬁelds in which ‘culture’ has been used and deployed by politicians and decisionmakers: British right-wing politicians, writers and consultants in organizational management, and overseas development workers. The Kayapo in Brazil make use of the concept of ‘culture’ in managing trends in ‘development’,

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particularly the ideology espoused by UNESCO which stresses the maintenance of ‘cultural diversity’. ‘Culture’, used by missionaries and state administrators as justiﬁcation for subordination and exploitation, has been (re)appropriated by the Kayapo through their own technologies (video cameras, ﬁlm shooting, radios, vehicles, etc.). Playing with the idea of authenticity, homogeneity, and cultural boundedness, the Kayapo’s constructedness of ‘culture’ was part of their ﬁght for the survival of their identity, as well as their economic and political destiny. 11 Joni Odochao was the ﬁrst ‘hill tribe’ person to receive this prize.

3

Trapped in environmental discourses and politics of exclusion Karen in the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary in the context of forest and hill tribe policies in Thailand Reiner Buergin

Trouble in ‘paradise’ On 13 April 1999 the Director General of Thailand’s Royal Forest Department (RFD) landed with his helicopter in the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary (see Figure 3.1) at the place where the Karen living in the sanctuary had just started to celebrate an important annual religious festival. The Director General requested to stop the ceremonies. Soon after, soldiers burned down religious shrines of the Karen. From 18 April to 12 May, soldiers and forest rangers went to the Karen villages, demanded that they stop growing rice, demolished huts and personal belongings, and burnt down a rice barn. When these events became public, the commander of the military troops involved declared the operation a ‘pilot project’ of a new alliance between the military and the RFD, exemplary for their joint efforts to prevent forest destruction (Bangkok Post, 13 May 1999, 15 May 1999, 16 May 1999; Nation, 30 May 1999, 13 June 1999). Throughout the following months, efforts to convince the Karen people to resettle ‘voluntarily’ and to prevent them from using their ﬁelds continued. Allegedly, military ofﬁcials conﬁscated identity cards and house registration papers while they raided villages, arresting people unwarranted for days, and removing families without Thai identity cards. Even though the Senate Human Rights Panel criticized the incidents, the RFD and the military continued with their joint resettlement programme in November 2000, announcing further relocations of families as well as the preparation of the resettlement area for all the villages in the sanctuary (Bangkok Post, 1 December 2000, 7 December 2000, 11 December 2000). For the Karen who live in the area that was declared a Wildlife Sanctuary in 1974, Thung Yai is also a ‘sanctuary’ – a ‘holy place’ – homeland and base of livelihood for more than 200 years. Thung Yai, the ‘big ﬁeld’

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Figure 3.1 World Heritage Site and Western Forest Complex: Thung Yai Naresuan and Huai Kha Khaeng.

or big savannah in the centre of the sanctuary from which its Thai name is derived, is called in Karen pia aethala aethae, which can be translated as ‘place of the knowing sage’. The term aethae1 refers to the mythological hermits who, according to Karen lore, once lived in the savannah. As ‘saints’ and ‘culture heroes’ of the Karen in Thung Yai, they are honoured in a speciﬁc cult. Karen seeking spiritual development still retreat for meditation to this important place, where a big annual festival is also celebrated. It was this annual ceremony in honour of the aethae that the RFD Director interrupted. Contrary to the image of the forest-destroying hill tribes deployed by the RFD and the military, the Karen in Thung Yai conceive themselves as people living in and with the forest, as part of a complex ‘local community’ of plants, animals, humans, and spiritual beings. Within this community the Karen do not feel superior, but rather highly dependent on the various other beings and forces. Living in this community requires adaptation as well as highly speciﬁc knowledge about the interdependences and rules of the community. Fostering relations with the various spiritual caretakers of the community is an important part of Karen life in the sanctu-

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ary. Their support has to be sought continuously in order to use the forest. In these rules and norms as well as in their daily practice of livelihood, which is passed on and transformed from generation to generation, a rich and highly speciﬁc knowledge about their ‘environment’ is contained and kept alive. This knowledge as well as the ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ local history of the Karen in Thung Yai is crucial for their social identity. From a ‘modern’ perspective many of these rules and traditions may be termed ‘ecological knowledge’. This term emerged in the dispute about how to handle a ‘global environmental crisis’ and – together with terms like ‘indigenous knowledge’ and ‘indigenous rights’ – became an important concept for localist positions in international and national environmental discourses. Here, the empowerment of indigenous people and local communities together with the protection of cultural diversity are conceptualized as alternative approaches to the solution of the environmental crisis, an alternative to technocratic conservationism and global modernization strategies. In the context of these environmental discourses, the Karen in Thailand increasingly are conceived of as ‘benign environmentalists’. Apart from these different conceptualizations, the ‘problem’ of Karen people living in Thung Yai is determined by conﬂicting interests and objectives of the various actors involved. The local Karen are primarily concerned with their physical and cultural survival which is threatened by restrictions on their land use system and resettlement. On the regional (subnational), national and international level, conﬂicts regarding the sanctuary arise, on the one hand, between commercial and conservation interests, on the other hand, between conﬂicting ideologies and politics regarding ‘development’, social justice, and solutions to the environmental crisis. Understanding the present conﬂict relating to the Karen in Thung Yai not only requires consideration of the different interests of the various actors, but also exploration of the history of these interests and the changing framings of the ‘problem’.

Local change and livelihood Approximately 3,500 people live in the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary. Most of them are ethnic Pwo Karen and were born in Thailand, predominantly within the sanctuary itself (Buergin 2002b: 189–195). The relation of the Karen in Thung Yai to the Thai state has changed frequently over time. According to Karen traditions, their ancestors came to the area ﬂeeing political and religious suppression in Burma after the Burmese had conquered the Mon kingdoms of Lower Burma in the eighteenth century. The ﬁrst written historic references to their residence in Siam’s western border area may be found in chronicles of the late eighteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, they received formal settlement rights from

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the Governor of Kanchanaburi, and their leader was conferred the rank of Siamese nobility Khun Suwan. When the status of the border area was raised to that of a muang or principality – between 1827 and 1839 – the Karen leader of the muang was awarded the title of Phra Si Suwannakhiri by King Rama III. Since 1873 at the latest, Phra Si Suwannakhiri resided in Sanepong which became the centre of the muang, and nowadays is one of the Karen villages lying within the Wildlife Sanctuary. During the second half of the nineteenth century this muang was of considerable importance to the Siamese Kings, guarding part of their western border with BritishBurma. Karen living there were consulted for the delineation of the border between Siam and Burma under King Rama V (Renard 1980: 20–24; Thongchai 1994: 72f ). In the beginning of the twentieth century, after the modern Thai nation state was established, the Karen in Thung Yai lost their former status and importance. During the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, external political inﬂuences were minimal and the Karen communities were highly autonomous regarding their internal affairs. This changed, however, in the second half of the twentieth century, when the Thai nation state extended its institutions into the peripheral areas. In Thung Yai the Border Patrol Police (BPP) and its schools were established in the 1960s. Since the 1980s various state ofﬁces supporting ‘development’ followed, as well as stations of the RFD and the military. The permanent presence of ethnic Tai2 in the Karen villages since the 1960s, as well as the activities of government institutions with the purpose of assimilating the Karen into the nation state, at ﬁrst triggered and determined changes of the social, political, and religious organization of the Karen communities in Thung Yai. These transformations and impacts include the decreasing importance of matrifocal kinship and cult groups, accompanied by the emergence of a more household-centred and patrifocal village cult, the clash of a rather egalitarian and consensus-oriented political organization on the village level with a more authoritarian and hierarchical external political system, and the obstruction of the transmission of Karen identity to the younger generations due to the Thai education system in the villages. (Regarding the complex dynamics of these local changes see Buergin 2002a, 2002b.) The economic organization of most of the households remained rather unchanged until the late 1980s and early 1990s, when restrictions on their land use system began to threaten the subsistence economy and material existence of the Karen in Thung Yai. Until today, most of the households in Thung Yai practise subsistence farming. They predominantly grow rice in swidden ﬁelds and some paddy ﬁelds, producing most of the basic provisions for subsistence locally. Within a territory ‘supervised’ by the village community, every year each household selects a swidden ﬁeld according to household size and work capacity. The secondary vegetation of a fallow area – predominantly bamboo forest – is cut, and burnt after a period of

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drying. After being used to grow hill rice, generally for one year, the ﬁeld once again is left fallow for several years, while numerous plants growing in the fallow are used continuously. The long fallow periods of 5–15 years (and more) – now prohibited by the RFD – together with speciﬁc cultivation techniques support the long-term productivity of the soils. Assuming a mean fallow period of 10 years, the total agricultural area in the sanctuary, including fallow areas, accounts for about 1 per cent of its area. In swidden ﬁelds, gardens, and forests, a great variety of other plants is grown and collected. Fishing is important for protein provision. Small supplementing cash incomes are obtained in most households by way of selling chillies, tobacco, and various other fruits grown within the traditional land use system. Wage labour is of little importance in most households. The mean annual income per person in 1996 was below US$50. (For an account of the social and economic organization of the communities see Buergin 2002b.) Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the relation of the Karen in Thung Yai to the Thai state was predominantly determined by categorizing them as ‘hill tribes’ and declaring their living place a national forest and protected area. In this context, the case of Thung Yai is only one example of a broader controversy on people and forests in Thailand. The controversy is rooted in conﬂicting interests involving the resources of the peripheral forest areas in the context of changing forest, development, and conservation policies.

Forest resources, modernization and deforestation Western concepts of territoriality, nation state, and modernity were crucial in the process of the emergence of the Siamese nation state at the end of the nineteenth century (Thongchai 1994). The forests of Thailand, as valuable natural resources for the colonial powers and the regional elites, did play an important role in these processes of globalization (Renard 1987; De’Ath 1992). The emerging nation state claimed control over these resources early on by establishing the Royal Forest Department (RFD) in 1896. At that time, the RFD was made responsible for about 75 per cent of the total land area (Vandergeest 1996a: 161f ) and presently the RFD still claims authority over almost half of Thailand’s land area. During the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, the main concern of the RFD was to allocate and control concessions for teak extraction, predominantly executed by British companies. Territorial control of the vast areas under the administration of the RFD was neither of interest nor feasible. There were only a few restrictions on local forest use, and forest clearance for agricultural purposes was even encouraged by the state until the enactment of the Land Code in 1954. It was not before the 1950s and 1960s that a remarkable shift in forest policies took place, now increasingly trying to restrict local forest use and to improve territorial control through the

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demarcation of forest reserves. (Regarding changing forest policies see e.g. Kamon and Thomas 1990; Sathi Chaiyapechara 1993; Vandergeest 1996a.) After World War II, international interests in tropical forests grew, and conceptions of tropical forests as important resources for the process of modernization were to guide the forest policies of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and many developing countries during the 1960s and beyond (Steinlin and Pretzsch 1984). The commercialization of tropical forests for the sake of national and ‘global’ development was widely accompanied by the condemnation of shifting cultivation. The changes in forest policies in Thailand were mainly in reaction to these international forest policies. From the 1960s to the late 1980s commercial forestry was of major concern of the RFD. The new objectives and conceptions of forestry also inﬂuenced perceptions and politics of the state authorities towards the ethnic minority groups who lived in the peripheral, forested mountain areas and practised various forms of swidden cultivation. Modern concepts of nature conservation had gained a foothold in Thailand around the middle of the twentieth century, together with modernization ideology. They were linked to efforts to shape a national identity. For Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, who had taken power after a military coup in October 1958, the conservation of ‘nature’ became a matter of national interest, and the swiddening practices of non-Tai ethnic minority groups were an assault on the nation. Under his military rule, the legal basis for the establishment of protected areas was laid (Vandergeest 1996b: 260). However, the demarcation of protected areas at ﬁrst proceeded slowly. While forest reserves altogether encompassed more than a third of the country in the late 1970s, and concession areas for commercial forest use made up for almost 40 per cent, protected areas accounted only for about 5 per cent. The global spread of modernization ideology and the expanding world market after World War II inﬂuenced not only national forest policies, but also overall national development policy. During the 1960s and 1970s, Thailand’s economy grew rapidly due to the diversiﬁcation and extension of cash cropping for the world market propagated by the state (Hirsch 1987a; Phongpaichit and Baker 1996: 1–88). Commercial interests in the resources of the forested areas, concerns about national security, a national development policy based on the extension of agricultural areas, together with population growth, resulted in the ‘colonization’ of the peripheral areas and rapid deforestation. In this process, many farmers settled in areas that had formerly been forest areas and gradually were demarcated as forest reserves. While in the early 1950s almost two-thirds of the country was still covered with forest, the forest cover was ofﬁcially estimated at less than one-third of the total land area in the early 1980s and the areas declared forest reserves were considerably larger than the areas actually covered with forest (see Figure 3.2). In the middle of the 1980s, deforestation was perceived as a problem by

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Deforestation, Forest Reserves, Concession and Protected Areas in Thailand (1950-1998 in % of Land Area 513.115 km2 ) 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% Projected, not to scale

20% 10% 0%

Projected in TFSMP Concession Areas

1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 1998 Forested Areas

Protected Areas

Forest Reserves

Sources: Kamon/Thomas 1990; Royal Forest Department 1985, 1993, 1995, 1999; Vandergeest 1996a; Pasuk/Baker 1997

Figure 3.2 Deforestation and forest areas in Thailand.

a broader public for the ﬁrst time. The new public interest in forests and deforestation was due to increasing societal conﬂicts and contested resources in rural areas, but was also related to the growing international and national awareness of a ‘global environmental crisis’ and the accompanying upswing of international conservationism. The RFD now had to explain the rapid and ongoing deforestation of the country – which was pointing to the RFD’s own failure – towards a conservation-sensitive urban public which was achieving increasing political power. At the same time, the RFD had to deal with some 10 million rural people, or about one-ﬁfth of the total population, who were living ‘illegally’ in areas that had been declared forest reserves or even protected areas. In the early 1990s, almost one-half of these ‘forest areas’ were used for agricultural purposes, constituting about one-third of Thailand’s whole agricultural area. The Forest Department reacted with a new forest policy based on a zoning approach that had emerged as a prominent concept in international conservationism (Vandergeest 1996a: 168ff ). The idea of zoning the country’s land area according to suitability and function based on scientiﬁc criteria had already formed the basis for Thailand’s National Forest Policy of 1985. It became central to the concept of the Protected Area System (PAS) as the main instrument of nature conservation, set out in the Thai Forestry Sector Master Plan of 1993 (RFD 1993).

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From commercial to conservation forestry In the middle of the 1980s, the RFD was still concentrating on commercial forestry, aiming at a quarter of the total land area to be designated as commercial forest areas, besides 15 per cent for conservation areas. Due to rising criticism regarding deforestation and the RFD’s commercial orientation, as well as resistance against its resettlement policy in the forest reserves, the agency was forced to considerably shift its focus to conservation forestry, not least as reﬂected in the Thai Forestry Sector Master Plan (TFSMP). The TFSMP has its origins in the international Tropical Forestry Action Program, established in the early 1980s when international concern about deforestation in tropical countries was growing. The TFSMP was supposed to be the basis for the implementation of the National Forest Policy. According to the plan, 28 per cent of the total land area is to be reserved for the Protected Area System (PAS). Outside this area, another 15 per cent is to be dedicated to commercial forests, aiming at a total forest cover of almost 44 per cent of the land area (see Figure 3.2). The PAS is to include all the still existing ‘natural’ forests, as well as all protected areas and watershed areas. Generally, the TFSMP gives absolute priority to conservation objectives in the PAS and preferably would have these areas free from human settlements. However, with its background in international conservation discourse and pointing to foreseeable problems, resettlement is made conditional on the consent of the concerned population. This may be one of the reasons why the TFSMP was never passed by the Thai Cabinet. However, its fundamental objectives of designating 27.5 per cent of the land area to the PAS and another 16 per cent as commercial forest area was already passed in 1992 (Bhadharajaya 1996: 11). The fact that, already in the middle of the 1980s, about one-third of the forest reserve area was used for agriculture – while apart from the forest reserves there was hardly any unclaimed land suitable for agricultural purposes – reveals the naivety or calculating manner of propagating the TFSMP as a solution to deforestation and ‘encroachment’ on forest reserves. It is not surprising that the conﬂicts between local communities and the RFD mounted up throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. In these conﬂicts over forests and reafforestation projects, a strong civil society movement emerged during the 1980s which, speciﬁcally in its more ‘people oriented’ parts, conceived the RFD as one of its main opponents. In the 1990s, the debate on community forests and the issue of people living in forest reserves became an important ﬁeld of societal controversy. The outcome of this controversy is still open (see Brenner et al. 1999; Buergin and Kessler 1999, 2000; Pearmsak 2000; RECOFTC 2002). On the one side of this controversy are the Forest Department, conservation-oriented academics, and ‘dark green’ NGOs who concentrate on nature conservation. They conceive of the relation between people and forests predominantly as exclusive and problematic, and speciﬁcally reject human

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3

settlements and community forests in protected areas. In opposition to these groups with a focus on nature conservation, there are various groups of the peasant movement, socially concerned academics, and ‘light green’ or community rights NGOs who concentrate on the interests of rural communities. They presuppose a vital interest of local communities in the protection of their local forests as a source of livelihood, as well as for its ecological and cultural functions (see e.g. Yos 1992; Watershed 1998; Sayamol and Brodt 2000). In 1989, the RFD was forced to consent to a nationwide ‘logging ban’.4 Besides this blow to the commercial orientation of the RFD, in the beginning of the 1990s it became obvious that resettlement of more than 10 million people living in forest reserves was no longer feasible on a large scale. This was clearly indicated by the failure of two big resettlement projects of the military: the Isan Kiew or ‘Green Northeast’ project in the middle of the 1980s, and the Khor Jor Kor project of the early 1990s. In accordance with the forest policies of the RFD, both reafforestation projects relied on the forced resettlement of people living in forest reserves – projected 1.2 and 6 million people respectively. They both failed due to heavy resistance. (See Perapong 1992: 82–185, 208–217; PER 1992: 68–77; Phongpaichit and Baker 1996: 83f.) In this situation of contested competence and authority, the Protected Area System became increasingly attractive for the RFD. Protected areas were extended considerably from about 10 per cent in 1985 to more than 17 per cent of the land area in 1999, with the objective to enlarge up to 28 per cent. The appeal of the PAS to the RFD is mainly due to its roots in prominent international and national conservationism. But there is yet another aspect to the PAS which improves the chances of the RFD to succeed in establishing a conservation area free of human interference encompassing more than a quarter of the country’s land area. While the majority of the people living in forest reserves are ethnic Tai, most of the people within the PAS5 are members of one of the various ethnic minority groups categorized as chao khao or ‘hill tribes’ who have a most precarious status in Thai society.

‘Forest people’ and the Protected Area System The term chao khao came into use in the 1950s to deal politically with various non-Tai groups living predominantly in the uplands of northern and western Thailand, which became of national and international interest at that time. Previously these groups frequently had been referred to as chao pa or ‘forest people’. Some of these ethnic minority groups, like the Lawa, H’tin and most probably the Karen, have been living in areas now part of the Thai nation state before ethnic Tai groups immigrated at the beginning of the second millennium. Others, like the Hmong, Yao, and Lahu settled in the uplands of present-day Thailand since the middle of the nineteenth century, or immigrated since the early twentieth century like the Lisu and Akha. (For overviews on these ethnic minority groups see, for

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example, McKinnon and Vienne 1989; McKinnon and Wanat 1983.) In the late 1990s, ‘hill tribes’ comprised about 840,000 people – or 1.3 per cent of the total population6 – and ethnic Karen account for about half of them. Anthropologists and geographers have differentiated these groups into those living predominantly in the uplands at altitudes from about 400 to 1,000 m above sea-level like the Karen, Lawa, H’tin, and Khamu, and those living at even higher altitudes like the Hmong, Yao, Lahu, Lisu, and Akha. While the former, comprising about 60 per cent of the ‘hill tribes’, generally cultivated rice in sedentary forms of rotational swidden systems in combination with paddy ﬁelds where possible, the groups living at higher altitudes in Thailand ‘traditionally’ practised forms of shifting cultivation with long cultivation and very long fallow periods, often including opium cultivation (see Kunstadter et al. 1978). This model, based on ethnic layers related to speciﬁc forms of economic organization, became increasingly obsolete from the 1970s due to state control, national and international development policies, as well as population growth in the mountain areas and lowlands. The economic systems and settlement patterns of the ‘highland groups’ have changed considerably. Swidden systems requiring very long fallow periods are not practicable any more, opium production in Thailand has become fairly insigniﬁcant, and highland groups increasingly have moved to lower altitudes as well. Here the rotational swidden systems of the ‘upland groups’ came under pressure, even more so as ethnic Tai were also moving into the uplands. Meanwhile, ethnic Tai constitute the majority of the population of the uplands, formerly almost exclusively inhabited by ethnic minority groups (see Uhlig 1980; Kunstadter and Kunstadter 1992; McCaskill and Kampe 1997). The reasons why ‘hill tribes’ now constitute the majority of people living in areas designated for the PAS are rather obvious. Historically the ‘highland groups’ predominantly migrated over the mountain ridges and adapted their economies to these living places. Some of them were forced to retreat into mountain areas by dominant valley populations, which to some extent is the case for ‘upland groups’ as well. These mountain areas in large parts are the ‘watersheds’ to be included into the PAS. Most of the remaining ‘natural forests’ are to be found in mountain areas as well, as the deforestation process in Thailand started in the plains and valleys, and is most advanced there.7 After conservation forestry received priority, these remaining ‘natural forests’ were increasingly designated national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, in many instances enclosing settlement and land use areas of ‘hill tribes’ (see Figure 3.3).

Hill tribe stereotype and national identity Since the 1960s, perceptions of these groups and policies towards them were predominantly determined by a stereotype of forest destroying, opium cultivating, dangerous alien troublemakers that was applied to the

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Figure 3.3 Hill tribes, forests, and protected areas in Thailand (Hill tribe villages as of 1978, forest and protected areas as of 1985/88).

social category chao khao (see also Pinkaew Laungaramsri’s Chapter 2 in this volume). This stereotype was mainly derived from the Hmong ethnic minority group, as their shifting cultivation systems frequently included

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opium cultivation, and some of them were involved in the communist insurgencies. But historical and ideological roots of the stereotype reach back to older conceptions of ‘forest people’ or chao pa. Among the various ethnic Tai groups of Southeast Asia, pa – referring to ‘forest’, ‘wild’ – is generally conceived as opposite to muang – referring to ‘civility’ or the ‘human domain’. Frequently, the pole of ‘civility’ was identiﬁed with dominating ethnic Tai groups, while the ‘forest/wilderness’ pole was related to marginal ethnic minority groups at the edge of the Tai polities (Stott 1991; Turton 2000; Thongchai 2000b). During the nineteenth century, these ‘forest people’ were of considerable importance for the ruling elites of the various regional centres, facilitating access to the resources of the forests which were traded as luxury goods. In the process of the economic globalization and territorialization of the region, this economic function of the ‘forest people’ became insigniﬁcant (Renard 1980: 24f ). At the beginning of the twentieth century, they were perceived as unsuitable for modernization and to be left on their own. It was not before the middle of the twentieth century, when the state in the name of modernization, national security, and ‘international’ anti-communism expanded into the peripheral forest and mountain areas, that the chao pa re-emerged in national politics as the troublesome chao khao or ‘hill tribes’ (Thongchai 2000a; Renard 2000). The forests, which had been their appropriate – even though discrediting – ‘environment’ at the turn of the last century, were now redeﬁned as a resource for national development in the process of modernization. Furthermore, at the latest since the 1950s, Thai-ness is frequently related to a speciﬁc pattern of livelihood and residence. Recalling the frames established at the turn of the century, Thai-ness and suitability for inclusion into the Thai nation is made dependent on a ‘civilized’ way of living, speciﬁcally: living in the valleys – not in the mountains or forests! – and growing paddy – no hill rice and swiddening! Referring to modern environmentalism, within this frame, the Thai people of the plains and the nation are dependent on the undisturbed (unpopulated!) mountain forests that secure the national water supply as well as the ecological stability of the country (Smansnid 1998; Watershed 1998; regarding scientiﬁc critique of the ecological assumptions of this frame see, for example, McKinnon 1989; Chantaboon 1989; Lohmann 1995; Enters 1995; Schmidt-Vogt 1997; Anan 1998; Forsyth 1996, 1999). The people of the peripheral areas who had been territorially included into the nation state at the end of the nineteenth century, were now culturally excluded as ‘others within’ (Thongchai 2000a). In the shaping of the social category chao khao, cultural concepts of national identity, modernization, and conservationism were merged, deﬁning the ‘hill tribes’ as non-Thai, underdeveloped, and environmentally destructive. Up to today this has been a widespread and inﬂuential image in Thailand (Krisadawan 1999), revived and exploited in the community forest debate and resource conﬂicts of the 1990s.

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Hill tribe policies, resource conﬂicts and ethnicism From the 1950s until today, policies towards these ethnic minorities have been concerned with the three problem areas attributed to ‘hill tribes’: opium cultivation, national security (read anti-communism), and deforestation (read swidden cultivation). During the 1960s and 1970s, the ﬁght against opium cultivation and communist insurgency dominated hill tribe policies. By the mid-1980s, both issues had lost most of their urgency (Buergin 2000). Now, about two-thirds of the remaining forest areas were to be found in the uplands of northern and western Thailand – the settlement areas of the ‘hill tribes’ (see Figure 3.3). Furthermore, deforestation had become a matter of public interest, and ‘forest conservation’ became the major concern of hill tribe policies. At the same time, the military assumed a central role for hill tribe policies, now predominantly a resettlement policy. Scientists related to the Tribal Research Institute had expressed their concerns about the resettlement policy towards the end of the 1980s: Throughout the period 1986–1988 in the last years of the Prem administration, the growing impatience with highlanders became clearer everyday. The idea took hold that since highlanders were cutting the forest, destroying the national watershed, endangering lowland property, were not citizens, constituted a security problem, grew narcotics and engaged in illegal trading activities then the quickest way to solve the problem was to simply move them out of the hills. This barrage of charges, advanced by leading national authorities provided a raison d’être for strong intervention, which was underscored by an increasing willingness to use the military and other paramilitary forces to move people from places like national parks, other forested areas and border zones where the government did not want highlanders to be, to places which the authorities considered more suitable. (McKinnon and Vienne 1989: xxiii–xxiv) In the view of the RFD, the ‘hill tribes’ had meanwhile become the main problem group regarding deforestation. Already in the National Forest Policy of 1985, ‘hill tribes’ are mentioned as a major ‘forest degradation problem’ (RFD 2001). Even more outspoken was a former Director General of the RFD in a talk to a group of PhD students in March 1996, referring to the resettlement policy and the protection of the watersheds against encroachment by ‘hill tribers’ as the most important task of the RFD (Phairot 1996). On the local level, with the spreading of ethnic Tai farmers into the uplands as well as the extension of cash cropping by some of the ‘hill tribe’ groups, induced and supported by the international and national

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opium substitution programmes, conﬂicts between ethnic Tai and hill tribe groups increased during the 1980s, speciﬁcally over land, forest, and water resources (Waranoot 1995; Watershed 1997, 1998). In the early 1990s, these resource conﬂicts – often termed environmental conﬂicts – emerged as a national issue in the context of the debate over the Community Forest Bill and the so-called Chom Thong Conﬂict. NGOs established in local conﬂicts to support the interests of ‘lowland’ Thai farmers against hill tribe groups in Chom Thong District, together with the RFD and Bangkok based ‘dark green’ conservation NGOs, now tried to push through their objective to remove the ‘hill tribes’ from the watershed areas on a national level (Buergin and Kessler 1999; Pinkaew 1999). The ethnicist traits of these resource conﬂicts increasingly came to the forefront, aiming at the exclusion of the ‘hill tribes’ in the context of a more or less outspoken, culturally deﬁned Thai nationalism. This discourse refers to the image of the ‘hill tribes’ as destroyers of the nation’s watershed forests, as well as to the cultural framing of Thai-ness as incompatible with residence in watershed forests and swiddening. For example, in August 2000, a leader of the conservation NGOs in the Chom Thong Conﬂict claimed that ‘This land is ours. We were here before. Hill people are not our people (chao khao mai chai chao rao). If they were Thai, they would live down here in the lowlands.’ This view is conﬁrmed when the Director General of the RFD, on a forum at Thammasat University concerned with the Chom Thong Conﬂict, laments that the territory of Thailand is gradually being given away to non-Thai, and the Deputy Agricultural Minister argues that the problem was that ‘90 per cent of the hill peoples are not Thai’ (Nation, 18 September 2000). In this perspective, the ‘hill tribes’, due to their place of residence and their way of livelihood, exclude themselves from the Thai nation. Even worse, they are threatening the welfare of the country by destroying its forests. Since 1998, acts of arbitrary arrests, forced resettlement, terror, and violence against hill tribe groups seem to increase once more (e.g. Watershed 1998, 2001). In May 1998, the Director General of the RFD signed an agreement with the Supreme Commander of the Army, specifying the cooperation of the RFD and the Army to protect Thailand’s remaining forests. In this agreement, the Army is given far reaching authority as well as ﬁnancial support for operations in forest areas where ‘illegal immigration’ and illegal large-scale logging prevail, while the RFD is responsible for forest areas encroached by small-scale farmers (Nation, 9 May 1998; Bangkok Post, 2 July 1998). According to this division of responsibilities, the RFD will mainly have to deal with the Thai farmers predominantly living in the highly degraded forest reserves, while the military is supposed to deal with the ‘non-Thai’ ethnic minority groups, often living in protected and watershed areas. The Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary – a core area of the Western Forest Complex conceived of as the most important forest area within the PAS – was among the ﬁrst target areas of

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this alliance. The fruits of the agreement were to be observed in the ‘pilot project’ referred to in the introduction to this article.

Promotion of an ‘exclusive’ sanctuary The idea of protecting forests and wildlife in western Thailand emerged in the mid-1960s among conservation-oriented ofﬁcials of the RFD. Due to strong logging and mining interests, it was not before 1974 that the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary could be established. Not only timber and ore, but also the water of the western forests became of interest in producing electricity for the growing urban centres. The Nam Choan Dam was projected to ﬂood a forest area of about 223 km2 within the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary. The public dispute about this project lasted for more than 6 years, dominating the public debate in early 1988 before it was shelved in April of that year. The success of the movement against the dam was not only a remarkable victory for conservationism in Thailand, but also a milestone in the process of Thailand’s democratization (Buergin and Kessler 1999, 2000). The Karen living in the area to be ﬂooded never had a voice of their own in the debate. Their interests partly were advocated by NGOs and journalists, but hardly appeared as an important argument, very much in contrast to the forests and wildlife. Pointing to the high value for nature conservation and biodiversity, the dam opponents on the national and international level had raised the possibility of declaring the area a World Heritage Site. This option would have been lost with a reservoir in the middle of the sanctuary. After the project was already shelved, student groups, NGOs, and academics again pushed forward the idea, fearing the dam project could be revived. On behalf of the RFD, the proposal to UNESCO was written by two outspoken opponents in the Nam Choan Controversy,8 and in December 1991 Thung Yai Naresuan, together with the adjacent Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary, was declared Thailand’s ﬁrst Natural World Heritage Site. The ‘outstanding universal value’ of the site, in the ﬁrst place, was justiﬁed with the extraordinarily high biodiversity and ‘the undisturbed nature of its habitats’ (Seub and Stewart-Cox 1990: 49). Despite this ‘undisturbed nature’, the Karen in Thung Yai were deﬁned as a threat to the sanctuary, and their resettlement was announced for the near future. Immediately after the declaration, international organizations in cooperation with national partners began to plan and project in and around the sanctuaries. The most important in terms of economic weight was a joint project of the World Bank and the Ministry of Agriculture, designed to improve biodiversity conservation and protected areas management in Thailand, this concentrating on the World Heritage Site. The preinvestment study for the project (MIDAS 1993) was disapproved by NGOs in Thailand who criticized its narrow conservation perspective, its top-down

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approach, as well as the high costs of the project (on the controversy see Ewers 1994; Malee 1994; PER 1995). The negotiations between the World Bank, state agencies, and NGOs focused on the controversial issue of resettlement. The study had cautiously argued against resettlement, though, in a rather ambivalent way and giving absolute priority to conservation issues. Keeping the option for resettlement open, a whole chapter was dedicated to its implementation. The Karen villages in Huai Kha Khaeng had already been removed in the 1970s when the Sri Nakarin Dam ﬂooded their settlement areas ( Jørgensen and Ewers Andersen 1982). During the 1980s and early 1990s, villages of the Hmong ethnic minority group were removed from Huai Kha Khaeng and Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuaries (Eudey 1989). The resettlement of the remaining Karen in Thung Yai was announced in the management plan for the sanctuary, drafted in the late 1980s, as well as in the proposal for the World Heritage Site. But, when the RFD tried to remove them in the early 1990s, it had to reverse the resettlement scheme due to strong public criticism. As resettlement was not feasible, the RFD prohibited the use of fallow areas older than 3 years. In the longer term, these restrictions necessarily will lead to the breakdown of the traditional land use system, as the soils under constant use lose their productivity. In some villages decreasing yields were already reported in the second half of the 1990s. In early 2002, the RFD started to plant tree seedlings on swidden ﬁelds (R. Steinmetz, personal communication, February 2002), forcing the Karen to choose between being charged as forest destroyers or facing severe subsistence problems. The only possibility for the Karen to adapt to these restrictions, apart from trying to avoid them, seems to be ‘modernization’. They may either try to increase the productivity of the ﬁelds, using fertilizers and pesticides – which most of them cannot afford – or right away turn to cash cropping or wage labour. Intensiﬁcation of agriculture and cash cropping is already propagated by some of the government institutions and NGOs working in the sanctuary. But most of the Karen in Thung Yai reject these efforts and prefer their subsistence farming. Furthermore, intensiﬁcation of land use, cash cropping, and market orientation leads to the destruction of their reputation as ‘forest people living in harmony with nature’ on which they have to base their claims to remain in the sanctuary.

Ambivalent transcultural resistance to politics of exclusion In the late 1990s, in the context of the ethnicist turn of conservation policies, the RFD once again deployed a more offensive strategy in Thung Yai, leading to the ‘pilot project’ of the RFD and the military. Open resistance to continuous repression and acts of violence by RFD and military ofﬁcials is difﬁcult for the Karen, not in the least due to speciﬁc cultural

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frames of behaviour and historically grounded inter-ethnic relations. In their encounters with state agencies they frequently feel they are without rights and powerless. They have the impression that their rights and concerns are not relevant in the national and international discourses about their home place. Currently, for the Karen in Thung Yai, advocacy by national and international actors is the only possibility of drawing attention to their situation, and the image of the ‘benign environmentalists’ (see Pinkaew Laungaramsri’s Chapter 2 in this volume) is their most important asset in the national debate that will decide their future in the sanctuary. In this national controversy the Karen in Thung Yai ﬁnd their allies among ‘light green’ NGOs and the community rights movement. But for the Karen it is an ambivalent ‘alliance’. A strong feeling prevails that they have to use arguments and ideas that are not their own while trying to justify their claims, even towards their Tai allies among NGOs and activists. The Karen conceive these ‘communication problems’ not predominantly as language problems – even though many of the elder Karen have only limited competence in Thai language – but attribute them to different cultural contexts. Almost all of the Karen in Thung Yai believe that resettlement is neither justiﬁed nor desirable, but they do take different positions towards the external inﬂuences and the resettlement threat. There is a rather small group, including most of the Phu Yai Ban (the village head in the context of the state administrative system), which is open for ‘moderate modernization’ without having to give up Karen identity. The vast majority is rather more reluctant to ‘modernize’, preferring to ‘live like our grandparents did’ as a common saying goes.9 Among them there are marked differences in their reaction to the external inﬂuences. A rather big group, who may be labelled ‘extroverted traditionalists’, including many inﬂuential elders as well as young people, is trying to shape the changes and resist the threats. They do so by trying to strengthen Karen culture and identity in an open-minded manner, as well as seeking support outside of Thung Yai. Another group of more ‘introverted traditionalists’ focuses on strengthening ‘traditional’ Karen culture too, but invokes to a higher degree millenarian and more ‘exclusive’ frames of Karen culture, rather avoiding transcultural exchange and support. Despite these differences of position and strategy, all these groups wish to remain in their villages as well as to protect their culture and living place. Furthermore, they all refer to the same cultural frame of values and objectives regarding a ‘decent’ life appropriate for a Karen living in Thung Yai. Sharpened, but not created in the clashes with external actors and inﬂuences, this conception of speciﬁc Karen values and objectives focuses on the concepts of ‘modesty’ in opposition to ‘greed’, ‘harmony’ in contrast to conﬂict, as well as ‘spiritual development’ versus ‘material development’. These concepts and objectives, to a high degree, reﬂect

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common Buddhist conceptions, but are also deeply rooted in narratives and images that seem to be more speciﬁc to the Karen in Thung Yai. The counterpart to these values and objectives is quite obvious and explicitly named by the Karen as such. It is primarily the ‘modern’ Thai society which is increasingly intruding into their traditional living places and spaces, threatening their cultural identity and physical existence.

Shifting frames in discursive hegemonies Looking back, several major reframings of the ‘problem’ Karen in Thung Yai and their relations to the Thai state emerge (see also Buergin 2003). The ﬁrst reframing occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century when the modern territorial nation state was established, and the Karen in Thung Yai were spatially included into the ‘geo-body’ of the Siamese nation state. The second reframing took place in the context of the nation building during the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, when Thai national identity was based on cultural features like language, Buddhism, monarchy, and a speciﬁc way of living. The Karen, who had been included into the state spatially, now were culturally excluded from it and disappeared from the political agenda. In the middle of the twentieth century, the third reframing was related to international and national modernization ideology and anti-communism. While the ‘frontier-areas’ were included in the national economy and became the base for economic development, the people living there were conceived of as ‘backward troublemakers’ in conﬂict with national interests who had to be monitored and ‘modernized’. The fourth reframing, since the 1980s, predominantly took place in concepts of international and national conservationism. In this context the remaining ‘wilderness’ has to be protected against humans, but as ‘wilderness’ is claimed by the ‘global community’ and supposed to be managed sustainably. In this frame, the Karen in Thung Yai are an alien element in a global natural heritage, and have to be carefully controlled if removal is not possible. The alternative image of ‘indigenous people in harmony with nature’ that emerged in the environmental dispute to question the dominating conservationist framing as well as global modernization approaches has to face reproaches from various sides as being partly ﬁctional, overgeneralizing, and/or violating people’s rights to development (regarding the case of the Karen in Thailand see, for example, Walker 1999, 2001).10 These objections are largely reasonable, and helpful if they serve to perceive actual situations without obscuring ideological frameworks. The criticism of the image is more ambivalent when replacing a stereotype by another one, as, for example, that of the ‘rural poor craving the beneﬁts of modernization’. It may even be true that the image of the Karen as ‘benign environmentalists’ has intruded government circles in Thailand, but the case of Thung Yai does not indicate that this image is very inﬂuential there.

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The external discourses determining the status of Thung Yai have long been those of international and national elites, the framing being the result of negotiations of interests and shifting power relations. In these processes, the international and national discourses became interrelated and mutually intelligible to a high degree. The Karen in Thung Yai have never participated in these external discourses and their local discourse is largely irrelevant on the national and international level. In the national and international discourses, the Karen in Thung Yai are predominantly conceived of as a disruptive factor in the sanctuary, as a threat to wildlife and forests. If they uneasily try to invoke the image of the ‘benign environmentalists’ – which is the only position in these discourses that to some extent accounts for their rights and self-perception – they are on the one hand trapped by commitments to external conceptions of ‘tradition’, on the other hand, they have to face reproaches of reaping beneﬁts of a deceptive stereotype. The only chance to escape these external ascriptions and discursive hegemonies seems to be the representation of the local Karen in the disputes and decisions about their living place. All discourses about Thung Yai – on the ‘local’, ‘national’, and ‘global’ level – refer to the area as being an important part of the ‘living space’ of the respective ‘community’, worthy of and in need for protection. Assuming there is something like a ‘national’ or ‘global community’ with a respective living space and respective rights to this space, Thung Yai is a case of a conﬂict of interests that has to be mediated politically. The concerned national and international ‘communities’ have committed themselves to principles of democracy and human rights, in the case of Thailand’s new constitution conceding far-reaching rights of local communities to their local resources and cultural self-determination (Thailand 1997). Asked whether they would agree to resettle if offered ‘higher living standards’ outside of the sanctuary, more than 98 per cent of the Karen expressed their wish to stay in their home places (Buergin 2002b). To conceive of the Karen as benign environmentalists may be wellmeaning and, in the case of Thung Yai, is furthermore substantiated by the studies done there so far (Pinkaew 1992; Ambrosino 1993; WFT 1993, 1996; Chan-ek, Kulvadee and Ambrosino 1995; Maxwell 1995; Steinmetz 1996, 1999; Steinmetz and Mather 1996; Kulvadee 1997; Buergin 2001, 2002a, 2002b). But a reframing of the situation in Thung Yai that comes up to the normative obligations of the concerned national and international communities should rather be based on the right of the Karen living there to defend their own case (see also McKinnon’s Chapter 4 in this volume), as well as from the appreciation of their different conceptions and values. As far as I can see, neither commitments of the national and international community to democracy and human rights nor possible threats to ‘their’ heritage warrant the forced removal of the Karen from Thung Yai. By way of recognizing their legitimate settlement and land use rights, supporting

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their sustainable land use system, integrating them into the management of the sanctuary, and securing their right to cultural self-determination, the forests and the wildlife in Thung Yai will probably be protected most effectively.

Notes 1 In Thung Yai aethae are conceived as pre-Buddhist ‘hermits’ with supernatural powers living a contemplative and ascetic life. The Karen term aethae generally is translated with the Thai term rysi, supposed to refer to pre-Buddhist hermits or ascetics in the Mon kingdom of Haripunjaya (see Turton 2000: 26). 2 The term ‘Tai’ refers to linguistic/ethnic categories, while ‘Thai’ indicates aspects of nationality. 3 The Director General who broke up the ceremony in Thung Yai had rather succinctly expressed his position on the occasion of an international seminar on community forestry when he declared in September 1998: ‘Man cannot coexist with the forest.’ To justify the position of the RFD of not tolerating community forests in protected areas he further explained: ‘Humans can’t live in the forest because human beings aren’t animals. Unlike us, animals can adapt themselves to the wild or any environment naturally’ (Bangkok Post, 24 September 1998). 4 Due to heavy ﬂoods and landslides in the south of the country in November 1988, attributed primarily to deforestation and the establishment of rubber plantations, more than 250 people had died, forcing the Government to declare a logging ban. Regarding the events leading to the ban see PER 1992: 14f. For an analysis of the arguments on the causes of the ﬂooding see McKinnon 1997. 5 Estimates regarding people living in forest reserves altogether range from 10 to 12 million, those for protected areas are considerably lower. In 1998 M.R. Smansnid Svasti, then Vice President of the Dhammanaat Foundation, referred to 591,893 people living in National Parks and Wildlife Sanctuaries (Watershed 1998: 13). In 2001 the RFD claimed 460,000 households to be living in ‘protected forests’ (Bangkok Post, 26 March 2002). 6 At present, only about one-third of the ‘hill tribe’ people do have the status of Thai nationals (Bangkok Post, 25 July 2001). Therefore, most of them even cannot refer to the existing legal provisions regarding their settlement and land use rights. Most of them, at best, do have a so-called ‘Blue ID Card’ and thor ror 13 residence permits, entitling them to stay in Thailand legally for 5 years and restricting freedom of movement to the district of registration. Contrary to the integration policy announced by the Government, the bureaucracy responsible for the naturalization of ethnic minority people is rather restrictive regarding these groups. Moreover, the discretionary powers of the ofﬁcials in the process of granting citizenship, quite often, seem to be used for personal proﬁt. (See, for example, Deuleu and Naess 1997; Nation, 23 July 1999; Bangkok Post, 31 December 2000; 19 July 2001; 2 September 2001.) 7 In the early 1960s, the forests in northern and western Thailand – the settlement areas of the ‘hill tribes’ – accounted for about 55 per cent of the total forest area. This share increased continuously up to about 68 per cent in the early 1980s, and has remained constant at about 69 per cent until the late 1990s according to RFD statistics (RFD 1985, 1995, 1999). 8 Belinda Stewart-Cox, who did research as a biologist in Huai Kha Khaeng, and Seub Nakhasathien, chief of the Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary. Seub

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committed suicide on 1 September 1991, out of despair about missing support within the RFD. Belinda Stewart-Cox (1998) commented on his death with grave reproaches towards his superiors at the RFD: Seub’s death was suicide – an act of despair – but it might as well have been murder. When he needed the support of his superiors to do the job they had asked him to do – stop the hunting and logging that was rampant in Huai Kha Khaeng at that time, master-minded by police and military ofﬁcials – it was withheld. A terrible betrayal. 9 This idiomatic expression does not necessarily refer to a ﬁxed set of behaviour or norms attributed to the ancestors – most of the people are well aware of the considerable changes over the last 50 years (see Buergin 2002a; 2002b) – but rather implies a wish to retain a primarily subsistence-oriented way of life, based on values supposed to be crucial for their existence in Thung Yai (see below). 10 In these discourses the stereotype of the ‘indigenous benign environmentalists’ ascribed to these groups is criticized from both sides of the political spectrum. On the one side it is argued that, if ever they have been ‘benign environmentalists’, development – not to be denied to them – will deprive them of this status. On the other side the concept of ‘indigenous-ness’ or ethnicity is suspicious for its segregating and discriminating potential. Both positions of critique – as well as the stereotype itself – tend to deny these groups rights to self-determination. While the ﬁrst position generally identiﬁes ‘development’ with the speciﬁc cultural pattern of ‘modernization’, the second one often tends to neglect actual differences between social groups and their importance for social/‘cultural’ identities.

4

Community culture Strengthening persistence to empower resistance John McKinnon

Yet if we can see that persistence depends on the forms and images being changed, though often subtly, internally and at times unconsciously, we can see that persistence indicates some permanent or effectively permanent need, to which the changing interpretations speak. (Raymond Williams 1975: 374)

Introduction The complex group of people known as Karen, like most peoples of Southeast Asia, assume a close relationship with place as an integral part of their identity. Their belief in the existence of sentient beings is granted substance as an aspect of the landscape. Community estates are deﬁned by the extent of permanent ﬁelds and gardens cleared in the course of cyclical swiddening, boundaries by landmarks which usually follow ridges above the most distant places to which home ﬁelds extend. Sacred groves of trees and speciﬁc natal trees serve as reference points of potential danger. Pathways on the ground like pathways in religious performance provide access to health, as well as a way out of hazardous territory. The landscape is alive with embodied, cultural meaning and culture itself is an unconscious strategy of survival. What happens when people are moved and the physical context of their everyday life is changed? Throughout the twentieth century the increasingly persistent intrusion of outsiders including Thai government ofﬁcials has changed much of what is thought of as a natural part of Karen culture in very fundamental ways. The increasingly aggressive insistence on the imposition of the authority of the modern nation state of Thailand to impose an all inclusive sovereignty over its territory, the land and people, and all that grows and moves on its surface has impinged heavily on the Karen world. Continuity with a past cultivated in relative isolation was broken by the felling of trees by commercial interests and the settlement of lowland farmers. As the century proceeded the formation of industrial forest estates, wildlife sanctuaries and national parks, as well as foreign notions of resource management, not to mention Thai ethnocentrism, all contributed to the sub-

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ordination of the Karen. The appearance of roads presented a physical manifestation of other inroads being made into the psyche of so many Karen by proselytizing Catholic and Protestant missionaries, and politically minded Buddhist monks found Karen who wanted their growing sense of vulnerability eased. In some places land was taken and people settled elsewhere. Where it was the natural path to follow, Karen became Thai. As a multiplicity of new inﬂuences found their way into people’s lives the challenge of change became manifest in a deep sense of alienation and loss: a loss of control, direction, context, meaning and conﬁdence. Today, for reasons I hope to explain, visitors to Karen villages are less likely to ﬁnd a silent subaltern people than just 10 years ago. The negative impacts of incorporation into the Thai state have not been reversed, dozens of highland villages still face the bleak prospect of involuntary resettlement but there are positive developments to report. A small group of activist NGOs such as the highlander-staffed Inter Mountain People’s Education and Culture in Thailand Association (IMPECT), and other environmental and farmer-focused groups, some of them based on the campus of Chiang Mai University, have done much to give minority people a voice. In this chapter I will explore the impact activist work has had in highlands of North Thailand by focusing on a brief period of ﬁeldwork conducted in the village of Ban Huai Hoi in June 1997 at the end of a longer journey.

Journey This is an account of a journey which commenced for me in 1975. In that year I was appointed by the Royal Thai Government, Department of Technical and Economic Cooperation and supported by funds made available under the New Zealand aid programme to the position of advisor in socioeconomic research to what was then the Tribal Research Centre of the Department of Public Welfare. It was a politically eventful year. The USA withdrew from Vietnam. Pol Pot came to power in Cambodia and the D.P.R. Lao was formed. Groups aligned to the left were ascendant throughout the region. The next year, following Thai military violence at Thammasat University, some 3,000 students were arrested and 2,000 or more activists and intellectuals left the cities to join a rural insurrection controlled by the Communist Party of Thailand (Saiyud 1986: 181). In that year, 1976, a military coup and the formation of the National Administrative Reform Council saw an end to a 3-year experiment in open democracy. In the north, under the authoritarian order of the day, farmer leaders were being shot by military assigned hit men; opium crop replacement was just getting under way; the loyalty of the hill tribes was being questioned. Even though more forest remained in the north than anywhere else in the

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country highlanders were being held responsible for destroying Thailand’s forests. The Bangkok elite believed that if the state was to survive it must demand loyalty, and if necessary, use violence to maintain order. I made my ﬁrst visits to Karen villages between 1975–1978. At this time their resistance to outside intervention seems to have been at an all-time low. Their capacity to persist was being challenged. Over this period I visited many communities, principally in Chiang Mai and Mae Hong Son, in the company of Thai and farang colleagues to carry out a wide range of agricultural and socioeconomic research. Every village is different but overall I was struck by a silence, a shy reluctance to engage with visitors and a passive willingness to accept whatever conditions might be imposed as part of the visit, such as an overnight or extended stay of a week or two, a wish to gain access to ﬁelds to take soil samples and set up ﬁeld experiments and so forth. It was an internal silence and by no means a complete withdrawal. In 1975 transistor radios could be heard. In 1978 Mae Sariang farmers close to the main road had started growing temperate climate vegetables such as cabbages that were sold to passing trucks headed for Chiang Mai. Few people spoke Central Thai. The lingua franca of rural areas was still Northern Thai or kam muang. Ten years later between 1986–1988 I revisited many of these same communities.1 The people in a newly settled village on poor land had dispersed. Nothing remained of their dwellings. Evidence of a sense of resistance was stronger. Two exceptional communities were no longer accepting visitors and wanted those in any way connected with government to stay away. In settlements closer to towns people were, as expected, much easier to approach, more likely to speak Central Thai and more conﬁdent than they had been a decade earlier. Over a period of 3 years I visited more than twenty villages and with all but a few exceptions enhanced communication facilitated by roads, the occasional television set and visitors, growing opportunities for trade, aid and education had contributed to an openness and degree of integration that was not evident in the previous decade. When I returned in 1997 to carry out, with the help of the people of the Sgaw Karen village of Ban Huai Hoi, Amphoe Mae Wang a ﬁeld test of a Geographic Information System (GIS) as part of an approach to Participatory Learning and Action (PLA), otherwise known as Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), I expected the process of modernization to have continued apace; but I did not anticipate the weight of injected substance provided by activist groups and the manner in which Karen identity was now being articulated. Although the village is only some 60 kilometres south of Chiang Mai city, the way in which people presented their position and understanding of ethnicity to advance a case designed to establish their authoritative knowledge in the matter of good environmental practice struck me as remarkable.

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This chapter is an account of that visit. It is about what I learned from residents and the other visitors who crowded into the village over a period of 2 days (11–12 June). During this period a memorial was dedicated to the memory of a village activist and a Karen Lue Pakha ceremony held to renew a protective cover over remaining forest. This event was followed by a very brief period of intensive interaction (13–18 June) with farmers which gave Ban Huai Hoi farmers a chance to talk about their situation as they constructed GIS images. The exercise provided a catalyst for wider discussion. I am well aware that such a brief period of ﬁeldwork is no grounds on which to claim a good understanding of the people of Ban Huai Hoi. In my defence, however, I would argue that experience is worth something and that since 1975 periodic ﬁeldwork in highland communities has given me a perspective that may be of interest to students of the Karen. What is of particular interest to me are the earlier conditions under which Karen lived and the rules they lived by, as recorded in truly awful work by people like Gordon Young (1962) – in a literature crowded with simpliﬁed, essentialist faults identiﬁed by Peter Hinton (Hinton 1986) which have to a large extent become what is symbolically the Karen of the new millennium. To some extent, it is as if the Karen have adapted an image of themselves not so much from who they are to themselves but who they are to outsiders.

Ban Huai Hoi: a Karen village Ban Huai Hoi is a relatively new settlement. Thirty or so years ago it was a hamlet of a larger village close by, that was seriously dislocated when a large part of its farming estate was taken by the government to form an industrial forest plantation. Given its proximity to Chiang Mai and the presence of teak the people were used to outsiders infringing on their world. Christian missionaries formally converted the people to their religions sometime ago. Contemporary Ban Huai Hoi is what remains of the population of two villages, one of which converted to Catholicism and one of which became Baptists who are now part of the United Church. The people share a small watershed about 800 metres above sea level of some 6,300 rai (1,000 ha). Much of the land is unsuitable for agriculture, steep and under a dry rain forest cover. Farmers do not have access to enough land to grow all their food needs and for years the less well-off have made up the shortfall by working as agricultural labourers in a well established, neighbouring northern Thai village. In June 1997 there were approximately 40 households which provided a home for just over 200 people. There was a good school within easy walking distance and most of the children attended. For some time young people in the community had been encouraged by missionaries to take up educational opportunities. The village supports two churches, quite

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substantial buildings built of relatively permanent materials. Education has continued to be promoted by IMPECT which got permission for us to visit from the villagers. IMPECT maintains a community centre, a house built in Karen fashion on raised poles. The main part of the building consists of a large room with a television set which is principally used to show videos. When a generator is available the set can be used to watch TV. The building is set up to host community meetings and during the course of our stay heaps of blankets were scattered around the room so that people could make a bed for themselves. We held all our meetings there and when everybody had gone home for the night we slept on the ﬂoor. Ban Huai Hoi is better serviced than most Karen villages. It may lack a reticulated electricity supply but a bank of solar panels, the gift of an aid agency, enables them to charge car batteries which can be used to run electric lights and power a TV/video. A large water tank gravity fed from a spring in the hills to the east of the village provides easy access to a reliable supply of potable water. A laterite road comes right into the village and a few villagers own pickup trucks. During periods of heavy rain the steep road up to the village is difﬁcult to drive but the streams are bridged and the village is rarely cut off from the main road for more than a day or two at a time. By far the most important source of livelihood is agriculture but, as mentioned above, farmers do not have access to enough suitable land to grow all their food needs. Only a minority of farmers owned irrigated ﬁelds. The agricultural activities of most households is restricted to dry sloping ﬁelds with shallow soil horizons, containing little organic material. Wherever possible ﬁelds are cropped annually and fallowed as necessary. It is not possible for farmers to follow the conservation practices described in the literature on cyclical swiddening. In June 1997 the monsoon had yet to come in. It was a particularly bad year. Most of the upland rice and maize seed had germinated but most seedlings had died for lack of moisture. Intensiﬁcation is attempted wherever possible and the development and ownership of irrigated paddy ﬁelds is given high investment priority by village farmers. Water was channelled from water sources at higher elevation, brought along contour lines and ridges to terraced ﬁelds. Attempts to maximize irrigated land had resulted in a few failures. Level channels dug into steep slopes collapsed not long after they were dug. Once water started to ﬂow porous material quickly became saturated and the subsoil, leached of its critical sticky and impervious clay faction, failed. An area of several rai on the same land, levelled into the slope of a nearby ridge, failed under the combined weight of several tonnes of water and increased viscosity. A high tech approach using an underlay of plastic sheeting and strict water control might have enabled farmers to avoid the loss by keeping inﬁltration to a minimum and reducing the bearing load, but it was too late for reconstruction: there was no foundation left to build on.

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Tourism was also an important source of cash. Thirty of the forty households purchased some rice with money earned from providing goods, services, or accommodation to visitors. Two householders who provided accommodation counted this as their single most important source of income and many more indicated that earnings from visitors had enabled them to invest savings in health care, education for their children, tools, house construction and the purchase of motorcycles. Perhaps because of the drought and the absence of work in the ﬁelds several women were engaged in weaving and the tourist shop next to the IMPECT centre was constantly attended by a representative of the women’s group who ran it. A widow selling necklaces of glass and shell beads was always on the lookout for tourists and cut an attractive ﬁgure in her Sgaw Karen ﬁnery. Her lack of English was no impediment to her sales technique and what would have been considered bad manners just about anywhere, including her own village, was made completely acceptable by a gentle smile, a quick lasso and quiet good humoured persistence. Remittances from absent family appeared to make a signiﬁcant contribution to the purchasing power of some families. From casual discussions with families it emerged that several grown children who had completed tertiary study and become qualiﬁed teachers and the like were living outside the village. Given the emphasis placed on education by both Christians and IMPECT and the positive way it was viewed by the community it could be assumed that a whole generation of Ban Huai Hoi Karen had been given the opportunity to enhance their literacy in such a way as to give them access to urban jobs. Several young people had received scholarships and made the transition to urban life. Ban Huai Hoi is typical of many contemporary Karen villages. However, as outsiders, once we emphasize the extent to which they are integrated or are becoming integrated into national life, it seems to make increasingly less sense to identify the people in a cultural and social sense as Karen. When tracked down in town, people of Karen village origin otherwise accepted as Thai and fully integrated into Thai society are not necessarily well disposed to being found out and identiﬁed as other than 100 per cent Thai. Over more than 30 years’ interaction with Thai friends and colleagues in Chiang Mai it is surprising how few, and then only in an advanced state of inebriation or deep conﬁdence, may admit to having Chinese, Burman, Lao, or Shan ancestors.2 As has been pointed out by Thongchai Winichakul (1994), the making of the geo-body of Thailand which continued apace through the days of the CPT insurrection placed pressure on people to ﬁt the image of an ideal citizen promoted by a conservative Thai establishment that has never accepted the use of nonThai indigenous names, let alone celebrated other ethnic identities. The practical advantages of being a Thai citizen are also considerable especially as it concerns how you are treated, whether you get access to education and title to land.3 Even then I found it surprising that the young

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Karen men who helped with our ﬁeldwork constantly used central Thai to speak to one another.4 Everyday life in Ban Huai Hoi does not have a very strong Karen identity. Although we are told by contemporary scholars that Karen ‘want to maintain shifting cultivation, a source of income which is closely related to their religious and spiritual beliefs, and which they see as their most important source of income’ (Bartsch 2000: 211), what happens when this becomes physically impossible? How do the religious and spiritual beliefs of Karen as Christians relate to the landscape and how it is inhabited? If their culture is under challenge and we are told ‘a common understanding among all villagers is that culture is the basis for resource management, and cultural conservation is integral to environmental conservation’ (Pratuang 1997: 123), does this mean that as the mode of production changes cultural beliefs will be lost and that if it is to survive culture itself must be reinvented, essentialized, given a life divorced from the agricultural round of which it was once a part?

Celebrations: cultural shift The two days of celebration revealed several things. How inventive and creative the people in NGOs who work with Karen farmers really are. What Karen are prepared to do to be accepted as responsible citizens of the Thai state, what Williams would call a sense of ‘permanent need’ (Williams 1975: 374). The shift from local practice embedded in culture as a way of life to culture performed as an event presents what could be described as a categorical crossing from mode-of-production-nature to political nurture. The transformation is worthy of note because it is staged for the very serious purpose of challenging and changing the widely held view of most Thai that ‘indigenous people [are] forest simpletons’ ( Joni Odochao talking to Karnjariya 1997b: 1). The ﬁrst day of the meeting held at Ban Huai Hoi visitors and residents: • • •

celebrated their guardianship of the forest; discussed environment and political issues focused on the Social Forestry Bill before the National Assembly since 1991; and renewed NGO resolve to continue their activist role.

The meeting was exceptionally well attended. As the principal organizing agency IMPECT had most of their staff present. Many local people associated with the Assembly of the Poor, the Northern Farmers Network and leaders of the Mae Wang Watershed Network (Nuai Neua) were joined by NGOs such as the Chiang Mai Diocesan Social Action Centre (DISAC), the Foundation for Education and Development of Rural Areas (FEDRA), the Appropriate Technology Association (ATA) and the Project

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for Ecological Recovery (PER). Amongst those present were most of Chiang Mai University’s leading intellectuals and activists who have distinguished themselves over a not always safe period of 30 years with their clear-headed commitment to issues of social justice and good conservation practice. There were also many students, media people and local government personnel present. The day began with a Buddhist ceremony to dedicate a small jedi erected over the grave of the Ban Huai Hoi resident who had been part of a demonstration organized by the Assembly of the Poor which had held a vigil outside the National Assembly for 99 days. It was said that on the return journey home from Bangkok, in despair at the lack of substantial gains, he threw himself from the moving train and suffered injuries from which he subsequently died. Gossip had it that he was suffering real physical pain and killed himself to end an acute medical condition. Whatever the reason the ritual was constructed around the image of a poor farmer who died a martyr. The ceremony was witnessed by several journalists including at least one from the Bangkok Post and a television channel reporter and cameraman. The importance of the occasion would not be lost on anybody familiar with Thai values. As one of the jewels on which the state is founded, Buddhism holds high status. To reduce or remove the sense of otherness or foreignness from the signiﬁcance of the man’s death it was important to create the possibility that he shared their faith, an important aspect of Thai national identity. Regardless of whether or not there was an intention to mislead a media-fed public, the performance alone validated the death in contemporary, if liberal, patriotic terms which would implicitly remind people of the greater moral context in which the death occurred. If the suicide was frowned on by Christian authorities this tough judgement was effectively neutralized by the positive connotations attached to the event by most Thai. In the afternoon a meeting was held in the United Church hall which had been cleared of any religious paraphernalia. The church was packed with people from Ban Huai Hoi, neighbouring villages, personnel from the participating NGOs and a host of intellectuals from Chiang Mai University. Everybody was encouraged to have their say and nearly everything that was said reﬂected strong environmental concern within a cause, namely to strengthen ‘community culture’, and pursue a path of alternative development through participation in both a network of organizations and sharing information and concerns in meetings like this. The philosophy of ‘community culture’ expressed at the meeting has been nicely summarized elsewhere by Rapin Quinn as a strategy, a means to help people strengthen themselves in the ‘politics of alternative development’ (Friedman 1992). By community culture, the Thai NGOs refer to every aspect of people’s social life, especially

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John McKinnon in relation to the production process through which the people learn the methods of production, social relations and values, methods of decision making and exercising their power. The aim in understanding community culture lies in a belief that it can be ‘reproduced’ in response to the increasing agrarian change produced by the ‘capitalist’ economy and culture. (Quinn 1997: 91)

The meeting focused on the need to promote good environmental practice and participants rambled through a range of personal stories and concerns. Everybody had a chance to speak and the lettered and the unlettered shared the ﬂoor equally. The issues that most concerned the gathering were issues of environmental degradation, the difﬁculties experienced by farmers in securing a living from the land and how this related to the diminishing resource base as measured by the poor condition of land, fewer forest resources and the late appearance of the rains. As the ﬁrst to suffer from any deterioration of the environment they felt they were being doubly punished: punished by the need to survive by making more intensive use of the land, punished by the government with the threat of involuntary resettlement because they were held responsible for the wider degradation of the catchment. Villagers from Ban Huai Hoi and the surrounding area voiced the opinion that they were the ones who protected and preserved the forest. They argued that it was only because so much land had been taken from them that they could no longer afford to fallow the land long enough for the forest to recover. They asked why they were being blamed for destroying the forest when it was the government that had given permission to business interests to fell trees for timber and proﬁt, and how wealthy people, ﬁguratively speaking, seemed to get away with murder. Academics and NGO representatives acknowledged the complaints and argued for getting on with the business of ﬁnding ways to keep what forest remained, that it would not be easy to argue a case for continuing occupation unless every attempt possible was made to show that highland farmers could be relied on as conservationists. They gave examples of what had happened, of what could be done; related personal experiences and offered on-going support. Outside under banners proclaiming His Majesty the King’s reign of 60 years and a host of ﬂags was a display of photographs and posters describing the work of various NGOs. Tables laden with pamphlets and reports lined the ﬁeld in front of the church. This was a fair held in Ban Huai Hoi to keep Karen resistance to government plans covering the upper Mae Wang watershed under which a number of highland communities have been marked for relocation. Although the day ended with an entertaining concert of very urban bands, the past performance and present position of government agencies offered little to support upbeat optimism.

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Royal Forestry Department The Royal Forestry Department (RFD) has for many years had what can only politely be described as a problematic relationship with highland farmers. I will assume that readers do not need to be briefed on the nature of this relationship other than to say that a statement made by Suthee Argaslerksh, when he was permanent secretary for the PM’s Ofﬁce, made a statement that still adequately sums up the RFD attitude: ‘We used to think that they are helpless pitiful people. But now, we have found that they are also extremely destructive to our forest and we must stop them’ (quoted by Vithoon 1989: 366). A brief history of speciﬁc RFD intervention in the upper Mae Wang watershed nicely documents the less than exemplary role they have played. In response to speciﬁc policy decisions by the state concerning environmental degradation the Mae Wang catchment was gazetted in 1965 by the RFD as a national forest reserve. In 1975 a forest protection and plantation unit was established. Hmong villagers in the upper part of the watershed were disciplined as much for opposition to the state as their pioneer swiddening and opium growing. Because the area did not lie close to a sensitive border state ofﬁcials felt they could intervene much more strongly with conﬁdence that whatever followed would only be read as political and environmentally informed patriotism. These events impacted on each of the communities in the upper Mae Wang catchment. Under the patriotic cover of decisive action the RFD also issued logging concessions which legalized commercial exploitation by the Thai-am Tobacco Company that needed wood for its tobacco drying kilns further down stream. According to Pratuang ‘Between 1969 and 1985, the area was logged for timber that was initially used for railway sleepers and electricity poles, and later to supply processing mills’ (Pratuang 1997: 138). The construction of logging roads opened the forest to new settlers, and farmers were brought in by local millers from San Patong to fell trees. Such settlers are invariably portrayed as acting primarily in their own interest, clearing trees to establish farms. What is usually overlooked is the fact that they are ﬁrst obliged to deliver the best logs to the man who organized their settlement, the mill owner who serves as their patron. Over the period marked by rapid loss of forest cover the RFD remained in the powerful position of being able to monopolize information about what was happening and continued to promote itself as defender of the forest. In 1985 following expiry of the last logging concession, on the misleading information that local people were entirely responsible for forest loss, a concerted progamme was mounted to bring shifting cultivation to a halt. Plantation forests were established on land previously worked by the Karen farmers of Ban Huai Hoi and many others. As if the loss of land was not enough of a disadvantage the RFD followed this up with a campaign which stipulated that farming was henceforward restricted to permanent

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plots. For the people this new policy was an act of structural violence which simultaneously alienated land on which they relied for their livelihood, and disenfranchized them of any rights they might have claimed as occupants of the land before the RFD laid any claim to ownership under the 1941 Forestry Act. The workshop held in Ban Huai Hoi over the two days 11–12 June was an opportunity to reﬂect on this history, but proceedings were not cast in an entirely critical and negative manner.

Replaying the past On the morning of 12 June the villagers of Huai Hoi assembled with their remaining guests from the media and Chiang Mai University to wait for the Nai Amphoe who was to accompany them on a 3-kilometre procession up to the southern ridge above the village. The account written by a journalist from the Bangkok Post best captures the intended impact of the performance. Khun Karnjariya’s account (1997a) employs the vocabulary and bias expected by his readers and has as much to tell us about why reporters were in attendance as what went on. Here is a paraphrased version in italics interspersed with comments. In an isolated area of lush green mountains far from the modern world is a place where spirits survive and retain ‘important standing among primitive tribal people’ like the Karen. This is the day of the half moon on which all of the villagers join the ‘Lue Pakha’ ritual to ask the powerful spirits of the mountain pass to protect ‘them, their crops and the area’s natural resources’. The Karen world must be isolated and the people must be seen to exist in a time that keeps them in a primordial state of being. Although later in the text the ofﬁciating ‘headman and sage’ turns out to be a Catholic this is not highlighted. It is unusual for very important ceremonies such as homage to the Lord of Land and Water to be scheduled outside the period between the harvest and the new year’s planting. It is also unusual for ‘ceremonial observances . . . (to) punctuate the year at set dates; all were moveable feasts within a range of about two weeks’ (Hinton 1975: 78).5 The genuine religious ceremony reported here by Karnjariya was also timed to ﬁll a propaganda role. On this occasion everybody is wearing traditional costume, ‘white for young virgins, green, blue, violet for the married, and black for the old’. The villagers ‘march up the steep mountainside to their sacred ritual site’ and after a while ‘eventually reach the spirits’ sanctum, hidden among the trees . . . (it) is the home of ferocious spirits and no agricultural activity can take place there. It is reserved purely for sacred ceremonies’. Virgins, sacred ritual site and the spirits’ sanctum set the exotic background for the scene. The mountain pass forest (taa de do) is

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indeed considered to be a pathway for spirits but the land is also steep and dry, quite unsuitable for agriculture. The description then switches to how the site was cleared in advance, the spirit house renovated and how the task of making the offerings is left to one man who manages the village’s relationship with the Lord of Land and Water and the multiplicity of beings that inhabit the landscape. A woman described as ‘the village’s witch honours the spirits with offerings of rice, tobacco, wild ﬂowers, beeswax, and alcohol’ and then attention turns to the ‘the most bloody part of the ritual . . . as with many primitive rituals, a life must be sacriﬁced to please the spirits . . . – a black pig’. As far as I am aware the Karen do not have witches6 but this does not preclude the possibility of a woman playing a role in such a ceremony. It was, however, an unusual aside to what is traditionally an exclusively male performance. It provided the Master of Ceremonies behind the PA system which had been carried up the hill for the translator and guide to the proceedings to point out that women also play an important role in the sacred realm of Karen life. The pig is knocked unconscious, its throat cut. The blood collected and smeared on the shrine lavishly described as ‘painting the spirit shrine inside and out, as well as the steps leading up to it . . . to invite the spirits to haunt the house . . . (the) head, ears, tail, heart, lungs, livers (sic) and kidneys’ are placed in the shrine as an offering and the remainder of the pork cooked for the participants. The killing certainly affected the observers from Chiang Mai. Spilling the blood of an animal which had been petted and calmed just moments before its death sealed the authenticity of the event. As the Master of Ceremonies pointed out, the purpose of the event was not so much to place on display a secret, primitive and arcane ceremony but to set up a preservation order on all the ﬂora and fauna in that stretch of forest: an order which if broken would place the offender’s life at risk. The message was clearly that the Karen are environmentally responsible, this is part of their culture, passing the Social Forestry Act into law would place care of the forest in good hands. What is not published in the Bangkok Post report is the mundane fact that in the feast that followed the special guests from Bangkok, Chiang Mai and overseas were seated very much in modern Thai style, with a high table of notables including the Nai Amphoe. Most of the activists of the previous day had gone home. Talk at the table was not so much about what had just taken place or what needed to be done; guests talked of where they had travelled in the world. Sophisticated credentials were established by everyone present. This was a meeting of guests with an international view of the world, including the Nai Amphoe. A sense of this extended and shared context made it possible for people to speak in a

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manner which was not limited by local sensitivities. At least two of the Karen leaders present ﬁtted comfortably into this arena.

Contemporary leader: showing the way Here I want to focus on the role played by Joni Odochao, a local village leader and prominent ﬁgure in the Nuai Neua network. Joni Odochao speaks with an anthropological awareness that was not a characteristic of an earlier generation of leaders. He provides a ﬁne example of the way a political case can be made for Karen legitimacy as guardians of the forest by consciously promoting positive aspects of ethnic identity. This represents a distinct development from earlier days when, not so long ago, the options open to Karen and other hill tribe peoples to exercise a sense of control over their domain were limited and being rapidly undermined. As an individual one could drop and/or disguise one’s minority identity and become Thai, or take a more ideologically driven position and follow people like Khru Ba Khaw who, as a disciple of Phra Sii Vichai, inherited an attitude of opposition to centralized Bangkok rule.7 The contemporary preference as presented by Joni Odochao may be no less ideological but follows an enlightenment format, the ‘community culture’ advocacy role advised by Friedman (1992). Given its more privileged epistemological origins and intellectual connections this anthropologically informed approach has a promising life expectancy as a counterpoint to popular Thai prejudice which, as Joni Odochao has pointed out, stereotypes hill tribe people as ‘forest simpletons’. Joni Odochao is a man of considerable intelligence and good judgement. In an article published in the Bangkok Post which followed publication of the forest dedication he is described as ‘Thailand’s most respected hill tribe leader [who has] travelled around the world only to ﬁnd that the secrets of peace and conservation can be found right in his mountain-top village’ (Karnjariya 1997b: 1). Joni Odochao mustered the conﬁdence to play the native son by attending international indigenous people’s forums. Disarmingly frank, open, charming and articulate Joni Odochao has a charismatic presence that invites agreement. What he has to say fulﬁls the expectations of idealists in search of the essence of indigenous knowledge. He is widely quoted. Here he is speaking to Pratuang Narintarangkul Na Ayuthaya in 1994 in a text translated from the original Thai by Philip Hirsch and Prue Borthwick: Us hill people can live only with intact forest. Intact forest must have seven layers. These include four layers above ground. A tree in the intact forest must be like this always: the large tree is at the centre; saplings and bushes surround this tree. These are the living quarters of birds and insects. Above the bushes and saplings are trees next down from that at the centre, trying to catch up with their ‘fathers’

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and ‘mothers’. There are orchids attached to branches, eating off the trees. At the lowest level are grasses and mushrooms. As for the layers below the surface, there are roots, tubers, worms, snakes; there are sweet potatoes, taros. It’s like this everywhere. But if one element is missing, the system is degraded, we cannot survive. (Pratuang 1997: 126) The subtext here is an abstract, model world which is more likely to exist in Joni Odochao’s imagination than anywhere in the world. Joni speaks for all highlanders. What is described as ‘intact forest’ takes on the character of a universal order which suggests ‘it must be like this always’. The promise of speciﬁcity indicated by a numbered certainty becomes a ﬁgurative extension of a human family as the spiritual image of the forest. Intact, this is precious, fragile. If only one element is missing ‘we cannot survive’ yet all over the central massif of Southeast Asia highlanders survive in heavily degraded environments. The poetic representation is a seductive simulacrum that represents what might have been in an ideal past for a people who are unlikely to have seen such a perfect forest. This deconstruction is not intended to discredit Joni Odochao in any way but rather to better understand what is going on. As someone who has won awards for his environmental work and coordinated the placement of protective ordinations on 50 million trees in 100 communities to celebrate the King of Thailand’s 60th Jubilee, he is clearly effective as an organizer and politician. He is also a patriot who, in his own words ‘want(s) to prove that lowlanders and highlanders can work together to protect the river basins in the mountainous North. That forest dwellers can be the best forest guardians’ (Karnjariya 1997b: 1). The esoteric capital of ethnicity is his principal qualiﬁcation and the world around him has become ‘his never-ending book’ (ibid.). As a Karen he learns from observation and the wisdom wrapped up in ‘our ancestors’ valuable knowledge’ (ibid.). Everywhere modernization brings problems which stem from clinging to power, greed for money, natural resources wars, intolerance to different beliefs, and gender discrimination. There is a simple solution to these problems. We’ve got to truly know and understand ourselves and our roots. And to follow our ancestors’ age-old teachings to live in harmony and tolerance. (ibid.) This is the voice of a priest but not the leader of a millenary movement. He does not say ‘reject all that is modern’, and although this moral and idealized position emphasizes tradition, as we found, this did not inhibit the people of Ban Huai Hoi from taking a highly scientiﬁc and technical approach to their consideration of the landscape.

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Mobile Interactive GIS (MIGIS) When the 2-day gathering described above came to an end the work that we had come to do with the help of the villagers began. We were there to introduce the community to the technology involved in a Mobile Interactive Geographical Information System (MIGIS),8 and to ﬁnd out if the people were interested in participating in its use and whether the system itself could add anything of value to the tool kit of Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) and what was then widely known as Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). The equipment consisted of a laptop computer and relevant software, a portable digitizer, a digital camera and a projector; IMPECT provided a generator. The idea was to recruit two teams, one made up solely of women and the other of men, use the local landscape to show how the equipment worked and see if they were willing to take photographs, prepare sketch maps of their own to locate cultural landmarks, land use, natural resource features and hazards. We wanted to ﬁnd out if participation would promote a sense of ownership in the results and encourage those taking part to talk about issues as they came up. Basically we were asking the Karen of Ban Huai Hoi to help us ﬁnd out if this type of mapping could contribute to the identiﬁcation and articulation of problems, enhance analysis and model solutions. This ambitious list of objectives to be carried out over a 5-day residence was absolutely subordinated to the willingness of the people to play the major role. The overriding principle was to limit use of the technology as much as consciously possible to the role of a neutral medium like a canvas primed for use. Our job was to prepare the canvas, provide brushes and paints and some basic instruction in their use to a group of people who were completely unfamiliar with the medium. What was to go on the canvas was ideally to be entirely theirs. If the artistic metaphor does not seem to be an entirely appropriate description of an exercise involving technology then perhaps a mechanical ﬁgure of speech is more apt. We had brought a new type of vehicle into the village and we wanted to ﬁnd out how it might be used by people who could not drive but for whom we were willing to play the role of chauffeur. The exercise was kept as simple as possible. The women’s team met in the morning between 9 and 12 and the men in the evening between 8.30 and 11.30. Initially we attempted to form teams of from four to six people. Three times this number showed an interest in participating and no attempt was made to limit the size of the group. A few men chose to join the women’s sessions and a few women attended the men’s. In joint meetings women sat at the back of the gathering. This had little affect on their ability or willingness to express their opinion: it was the women who were most outspoken when it came to discussing problems.

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Mapping day 1 The ﬁrst sessions were introduced in Karen by a voluntary male ﬁeld assistant. He asked each team to draw a map of the village estate on the digitizing tablet (1,000 cm ⫻ 1,500 cm) using four coloured water-soluble felt pens showing features which they considered to be of interest or note. The teams instructed a scribe/cartographer, who drew in rivers and streams, then roads and so forth until they had built up a framework to which details could more easily be added. New scribes took over from time to time. Features which were considered to be incorrect were erased and drawn again, and again, until the participants were satisﬁed with what they had. Digitizing then commenced. After being shown how the digitizing puck worked, other members of the teams traced the lines on the digitizer tablet. This action was projected onto a screen which demonstrated how information could be transferred from the drawing board to the computer. This enabled the participants to gain some idea of how the information was read, stored and could be made available at the push of a button. By this time the participating teams had already given the researchers at least 3 or more hours of their time and were told that the visitors would ﬁnish this work. ‘Would the team like to come back tomorrow at the same time, check their work and correct any mistakes?’ Mapping day 2 The next day a similar number of both women (am) and men (pm) attended the editing sessions. The digitized maps were projected onto a screen, one thematic feature being superimposed on the other until the map was complete. At both sessions the participants chose colours and symbols to represent features and sites around the village. All requests for changes were discussed by pointing out errors or where information was missing from images projected onto a screen. Alterations and additions were made while participants watched and these were retained or rejected following the joint decision of the group. As people came to appreciate how easy it was to change their map then suggestions came thick and fast. Both teams entered the exercise with enthusiasm. The men often competed for the right to hold the pointer and were much more concerned with details, especially those relating to the drainage pattern, roads, the position and number of buildings. The women were happier with approximate locations and representing general problem areas rather than getting exact positions and the number of buildings right. This process took as long as it had to to draw the original sketch map. As this meeting came to a close participants were encouraged to talk about problems and challenges related to resource management. The

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session ran well over time and 4 hours elapsed before attention ﬂagged. A decision was taken to present both maps to the combined group in the evening of the following day to compare results and follow up on issues arising out of the exercise. Mapping day 3 (Sunday) The combined meeting was attended by more people than could easily be accommodated in the Cultural Centre with the men sitting in front and the women towards the back: more than 60 people in all. The sketch maps were gradually reconstructed by projecting single layer themes: the women’s rivers overlaid by the men’s; the women’s roads by the men’s; and so forth until two completed maps were superimposed over each other. Hot links were made to photographs of prominent village features and a tour of a virtual if sketchy reality could be made of the village and the surrounding landscape. As the different interpretations were discussed other issues emerged from the proceedings and people began to speak freely about problems. Using the map as a starting point the people of Ban Huai Hoi talked openly about: • • • • • • •

the loss of land and lack of title to the land they had worked since the turn of the century; their fear of involuntary resettlement; the endemic shortage of rice; apprehension about further loss of land to the Royal Forestry Department: and, how past losses had resulted in the shortening of the swidden fallow cycle; the continuing drop in yields from upland rice ﬁelds; loss of irrigated rice ﬁelds to slope failure.

At the end of this session computer-generated relief models from other countries were presented for comment. These were read without difﬁculty. We were urged to produce maps like this of Ban Huai Hoi so the community could strengthen the presentation of their case to government ofﬁcials in the belief that it would demonstrate that they not only knew where their community forest lay but how they could competently manage it. In the absence of any prominent leaders, spokesmen, NGO representatives or academics the villagers were quite capable of stating their case in a rational manner without resorting at any time to a more sentimental strategy of referring back to an ideal past. Over the next 2 days these themes were further explored and triangulated by ﬁeld checks: land slumps, the position of prominent features (waterfall and sacred forest area); and by interviews with a structured

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sample of households to establish their composition and socioeconomic status. I spent an afternoon with the elder and religious leader Hek Hong who had ofﬁciated at the Lue Pakha ceremony to propitiate and manipulate the spirits that frequent the area around the taa de do forest shrine. As a good Christian who has to maintain the integrity of his souls in order to contact the spirits Hek Hong saw no contradiction between his inherited beliefs and his Catholic faith; and, as the literature shows, Karen in general have fostered syncretistic belief systems which combined nativisitic, Buddhist and Christian elements since reports ﬁrst appeared (Marshall 1922: 210–211, 264–265).9 Although none of the other shrines around the village in the surrounding countryside showed signs of recent use and most were in an advance state of decay, guided visits were conducted with a considerable degree of respect. I was told a story of a man who had cleared land in close proximity to a sacred natal grove of mature rainforest trees and who as a consequence had fallen seriously ill. Springs, the conﬂuence of two streams, the burial ground were all treated with reverence and awe in a manner not so different from that reported by Anan for Northern Thai (Anan 2000: 205). While the way the Karen of Ban Huai Hoi are able to report and talk about the way the landscape is inhabited has become more open and an important part of self advocacy is not entirely invented, what they have to say clearly follows not only the oral texts of their own story tellers but also what anthropologists have to say about them.

Concluding observations The few days reported here have a lot to tell us about Ban Huai Hoi and what has happened in highland communities over the past decade. Minority ethnic groups have gained a great deal of conﬁdence from the work of NGOs such as IMPECT, which have recruited indigenous people who have not only experienced subordination but understand what it means. In building conﬁdence NGO researchers and ﬁeldworkers have encouraged people to take pride in who they are by promoting received images, massaging ceremonies for a wider audience, and picking up politicalcultural touchstones that optimize reference to feel-good factors, especially those associated with good conservation practice. This is a very positive shift away from culture as a way of life, to culture as a collection of ethno-linguistic behavioural, ethical and epistemological artefacts that are consciously cultivated and performed. In Williams’ (1975) terms this is a necessary shift. If Karen are to persist as Karen this may well depend on them being able to change the forms and images of their beliefs, aspects of culture that mean something to them: ﬁnd expression in the language and symbols of the past to speak to the present. This provides the moral stuff on which resistance can be built. It is not false

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memory. It is not a reconstructed, entirely and conveniently reinvented history but a harvested legacy that makes resistance possible. If persistence is passive and connected to the past, resistance is active and connected to the present. There was little about the ceremonies for which accounts are provided in this chapter that can be described as passive. What comes through strongly is a theme of pragmatic and dynamic syncretism which is positive and active. The ceremonial events held in the ﬁrst 2 days of the visit established important symbolic connections. The memorial erected for an unlikely martyr emphasized the Thai character of the broader political-religious context. The open seminar which followed, where farmers sat alongside academics in an intellectually united, democratic front, underscored the character of the proceedings as an occasion on which voices of resistance were heard at centre stage. The vehicles, the shared values of community culture and concern for the environment dominated proceedings. The sacriﬁce of a pig to renew a protective cover on the forest placed a ﬁrm Karen stamp of identity on an objective sought by government. Because it was enacted in the presence of the Nai Amphoe and other local dignitaries representing the wider Mae Wang community it became a formal declaration. It was as though the celebrants had said, ‘We, the Karen, may have different ways of expressing concern but we share the same environmental values as the government.’ In the following few days in the course of the MIGIS exercise the people of Huai Hoi showed that left to their own devices they were willing to embrace a completely new way of reviewing their resources, strengthening their resistance to government encroachment, and demonstrating their understanding of what constitutes good resource management. Their inclusive, pragmatic attitude enabled them to explore established perceptions of their environment and infrastructure through a new medium, demystify highly technical and scientiﬁc instruments and see how they might serve as a medium and authority to diminish their subordination within the legal-political matrix of the Thai state. There is an important lesson in this. Note needs to be taken by those seriously seduced by ideas and ideals of indigenous spirituality and closeness to nature that people like the Karen can be accurately portrayed by more than just the images of what they might have been in the past. Those who do not realize that the trick is to seduce people other than themselves with essentialist views of community culture endanger those whom they would help by assigning them to a category of quaintness. This is why it is so important to extend the use of computer-driven tools to those who can learn quickly how to use them to their advantage. In the political world credibility is everything. Resistance relies on more than working from the fashionable and moral high ground of indigeneity. As Williams (1975) and others (Bourdieu 1977; Li 1996; Anan 2000) have pointed out, communities faced with the challenge of survival and

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the wish to persist as a distinct cultural group and resist further losses are best advised to change and adapt new ways, new forms and images through which to express themselves. This capacity to reinvent if necessary and certainly to realign ‘community culture’ is a creative and intellectual achievement of considerable note. The Karen of Huai Hoi have made the most of the sensitive and intelligent intervention of a liberal cohort of Chiang Mai intellectuals and NGOs. Activists have bolstered self conﬁdence and helped people believe they can change things for the better. The best tools available should be used to further this development.

Acknowledgements The ﬁeldwork on which this paper is based could not have been undertaken without the generous support of the Inter Mountain People’s Education and Culture in Thailand Association, especially the help of the Director Prasert Trakansuphakon and Kittisak Ruttanakrajangsri. Their logistical support, expert advice and interest was invaluable. Both Ajarn Chira Prangkio and Dr Sanay Yarnasarn, Department of Geography, Faculty of Social Science at Chiang Mai University did more than their share as friends and colleagues to see that the brief visit went well. I would like to particularly acknowledge the contribution made by my former colleague at the Institute of Geography, School of Earth Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, Dr Graeme Aggett with whom I shared the ﬁeldwork and who provided the GIS expertise. To all these people I owe a debt of thanks. They are not responsible for the opinions expressed in this chapter.

Notes 1 I was employed over this period by ORSTOM, the Institut de recherche pour le développement, which now uses the acronym IRD. 2 This has also been dictated to a certain extent by fashion. Before the 1997 crash, chic, wealthy Thai-Chinese were using their Chinese names in public. 3 ‘Without Thai citizenship, these hill people are unscrupulously treated by government ofﬁcials. More than 70 percent have no access to formal Thai education and only about 60 percent can speak Thai. Even though most hill dwellers are actively engaged in agriculture, only about 35 percent own their own land’ (Anan 1997: 204). 4 This may have been done to impress us. My Thai is so bad that it may have afforded them some amusement to demonstrate their comparative ﬂuency. 5 Hinton’s study of a Pwo Karen community in Mae Sariang was carried out over an 18-month period in the late 1960s. At that time it was highly unlikely that such an event would have been staged for outsiders. 6 The ‘eldest woman in (an important) . . . matrilineal kin group . . . presides at ritual offerings to ancestral spirits’ (Lebar et al. 1964: 62). 7 Williams’ comment which refers to people faced with profound changes during the rise of capitalism and the displacement of rural people during the industrial revolution is interesting: ‘the reﬂex indeed being fundamentally defensive, with

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no available conﬁdence in any different way of life, or with such conﬁdence replaced by utopian or apocalyptic visions, none of which can connect with any immediate social practice or movement’ (Williams 1975: 363). 8 A streamlined form of MIGIS has subsequently been used successfully in extended community-based planning exercises in Hani communities in Yunnan, P.R. China (1999) and Khmer villages in Kampong Spueu, Cambodia (2001). 9 Those with an interest in the study of Karen millenary movements should consult the work of Charles F. Keyes. His work was not used in the preparation of this chapter but is the best single source of information available.

Part II

Social practices and transformations Courtship, marriage, and changing sexual morality

Introduction to Part II Yoko Hayami

Field-based studies by anthropologists on the Karen on such topics as ecological adaptation, religious change, and ethnic relationships, have borne much fruit. Reading through these works, we gain some passing glimpses into Karen social relationships from the intimate marital bonding, the family relationships, community-level relationships to relationships with outsiders. However, these tend to form merely the backdrop against which the above-mentioned topics are discussed. Certain tendencies such as strict sexual norms, importance of maintaining harmony in face-to-face situations, and a general sense of avoidance of conﬂict have often been pointed out in passing. The chapters in Part II each contribute a better view towards the workings of social relationships and how these tendencies are actualized in various situations. Part II consists of three papers based on substantial ﬁeldwork conducted by anthropologists from the 1970s to the 1990s in different parts of Chiangmai Province. Coming from different angles, the three chapters present complementary textured and in-depth description and analyses of social life in the Karen communities, especially on aspects related to the marital bond. Another common theme in the three chapters is the communicative modes by which the Karen avoid social conﬂict and face-toface embarrassment, while at the same time they attempt to get their own way both in groups and in individual encounters. While all of the three authors address in one way or another the changes taking place within the hill communities accompanying religious conversion and changing relationship to the city and lowlands, they also draw our attention to the continuities in social and cultural practices and the norms and sanctions which form the background of such practices. All three provide textured and detailed data on aspects of Karen life that have hitherto been underdocumented: adolescent singing in funerals, discourse pertaining to sexuality in the communities, and the traditional verses. Fink’s chapter provides us with a lively view of teenage culture among Pwo Karen youths, beginning from the pre-marital courtship, emphasizing romance, the joys and anxieties of adolescence. The colourful descriptions of teenage fashion, courtship, and the pangs of romance constitute

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the reason why, in Fink’s words, ‘Karen look back on their teenage years as the happiest times in their lives’, with exuberance and excitement towards the future. Of all the courtship occasions, funeral singing is depicted as the most exciting for Karen youths, and Fink mentions the importance of the oral tradition that is sung on these occasions by Karen youths in pairs. The lively account of the actual scene allows us to see how teenage romance in Karen society takes a strange form yet evokes familiar feelings. The account then turns to how romantic relationship and courtship is formalized and then ﬁnalized in marriage. Fink notes that amidst the festive occasion is the tension-ridden communication between the community of the bride and that of the groom. She then highlights some of the negative aspects of this emphasis on love-based monogamous marriage, pointing out that the ultimate basis of sanction is the spirits, or the fear of causing their anger, and ﬁnally the changes due to school education and Christian conversion. Fink concludes by pointing out the complementary nature of Karen gender relationship as reﬂected in the courtship practices, and how the recent changes may affect this. Hayami’s discussion of morality and sexuality among Sgaw Karen complements Fink’s paper in many ways. Hayami seeks to understand the basis of the ‘morally upright’ Karen, the purity of their maidens and the monogamous emphasis as envisioned by outsiders, by seeking the contexts in Karen social life in which discourse on ‘sexuality’ or sexual morality are embedded. While acknowledging the relative autonomy of Karen women in the hills as does Fink, Hayami also points out that regarding sexual morality, there are double standards that operate against women. Hayami attempts to analyse this and further examine the ways in which women cope with it, especially in the midst of increasing mobility and diversifying inter-ethnic encounters. She does this by taking up some cases of women who traverse the upland–lowland spatial divide, overlaid by the Karen–Thai ethnic divide. Thus, she points out that the ways in which Karen sanction and deal with sexuality in some ways even deﬁne interethnic relationships. Mischung is in complete agreement with Fink on the importance of the Karen oral tradition hta, which he claims is one of the markers of Karen identity according to his informants. His chapter takes up some Sgaw Karen verses sung at the wedding ceremony, so that through the analysis of the verse as well as the context, he complements the previous two chapters in throwing light on another facet of the wedding and the marital bond. He points out that Karen oral traditions, especially hta, have not received the attention they deserve. As Mischung indicates, the verses which follow strict formal rules of couplets (comparable, as he points out, to some of the poetic traditions of insular Southeast Asia as introduced by Fox) are poetic and very difﬁcult to translate, even for native Karen speakers. (In my own ﬁeld, I attempted some transcription and translation, but many Karen youths acknowledged that they did not know what the words

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meant.) However, the more socially relevant aspect of Mischung’s study is that hta not only allows one to properly follow tradition through its recitation, but it also allows one to express things that could not be said otherwise without disrupting interpersonal relations. After a discussion of some technical aspects of the verses, the latter half of the paper analyses a verse sung in the marriage ceremony between the bride’s side and the groom’s side, thus elaborating on the tension that Fink mentions in her chapter.

5

Living for funerals Karen teenagers and romantic love Christina Fink

Introduction Karen teenagers, like teenagers in so many cultures, are obsessed with romance. This is true not only of Karen who have been exposed to city life but also of Karen who have grown up with very few links to the modern world. Romance among the Karen has been largely overlooked in the scholarly literature; yet, it is what imbues Karen life with so much meaning and excitement. Karen are often written about in terms of their relationship to the environment, their emphasis on harmony with spirits and members of the community, and their political struggle for autonomy in Burma. However, what so many young Karen spend so much time thinking about and so many older Karen spend time reminiscing about are their romantic encounters. Among animist Pwo Karen in northwest Thailand, love songs are memorized and practised while weeding the ﬁelds, wage labour is engaged in to purchase eye-catching clothes and adornments which will impress members of the opposite sex, and even writing is sometimes only learned to help with memorizing love songs and sending love poems. Given the dearth of information in English on Karen romance, this chapter provides an ethnographic description of romantic practices.1 It draws primarily on the experiences of animist Pwo Karen in the rugged northwest corner of Om Koi District, Chiang Mai Province. When I arrived in Ti Kree Say in 1992 to conduct my dissertation research, most of the villagers had never seen magazines, TV, or movies, and only a few men spoke rudimentary northern Thai. Fearful of communities beyond plong rekang, or Pwo Karen territory, they continued to take pride in most of their distinctive practices, including their courting rituals. If we take romance to mean sentimental or idealized love, then this certainly ﬁts the young Karens’ longing for such pleasures, which take them beyond their constant struggle to survive. Let me state at the outset, though, that Karen romantic culture does not bear any resemblance to steamy scenes out of Western romantic novels. There is no revealing clothing, no suggestive dancing, and virtually no physical contact between

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teenagers in love. While teenagers may ﬁnd occasions to sneak off into the forest together, such behaviour is not sanctioned by older villagers. Romantic behaviour among the animist Karen focuses instead on singing courting songs, sipping rice wine together at celebrations, and engaging in verbal repartees. Some young men use music and love poems to woo their sweethearts, and members of both sexes spend hours fantasizing about sharing their lives with the person of their dreams. While conducting my dissertation research in 1992 and 1993, I was particularly attuned to teenage culture, because of the way I was integrated into the village. Rather than live with one family all the time or live in my own house, I slept in different houses each night. Teenaged girls took turns inviting me and were primarily interested in discussing teenaged guys with me. In the evenings, teenaged boys would come to visit the girls, giving me a chance to observe their interaction. Teenaged boys and girls alike sought me out to record love songs on my tape recorder, and when I travelled to other villages, they begged me to record their friends singing love songs so they could listen upon my return. The photographs I took of teenagers in the village I lived in and in other villages also became highly valued possessions, traded far and wide among teenagers in the area. Although I often visited older married people to learn more about local politics, economics, and religious practices, they too often turned the discussion to current love interests in the village or remembrances of their own joyful days as courting teenagers. In this chapter, I will ﬁrst discuss how the teenage years, when romances bloom, ﬁt into the broader life cycle. I will then describe the opportunities for the development of romances and the meaning of romantic love in a culture which stresses strict monogamy. I particularly emphasize the formalized rites of courtship incorporated in funeral ceremonies, because these are the most elaborated courting rites and the ones for which Karen teenagers spend the most time preparing. Finally, I will talk about how romantic practices have been modiﬁed in the Om Koi area and beyond, as the villagers have had more contact with Thai ofﬁcials and NGO workers, children have begun attending school, and families have converted to Christianity.2

Romance and the life cycle Romance involves engaging in behaviours that will attract members of the opposite sex, such as cultivating certain talents and mannerisms and making an effort to look beautiful. What constitutes an attractive mannerism or a beautiful appearance must be learned, and young children come to understand and value Karen ideals of beauty and charm through observation and listening to others. At a very young age, children begin to be socialized into prescribed gender roles, with girls practising simple weaving techniques and boys

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learning to hunt with rat traps and slingshots. Girls are dressed in handwoven white dresses while boys wear hand-woven sleeveless red shirts or manufactured T-shirts with pants. As girls and boys approach adolescence, they begin to take more interest in their appearance. Parents begin purchasing beads and bracelets for their daughters, and boys start to bathe and comb their hair more often and dress more carefully. Unmarried girls who have entered puberty are referred to as muh nang, and the period of being a muh nang is usually from about 13 to 18. Most girls get married between the ages of 16 and 18, and to marry at 19 or 20 is considered old. I too was classiﬁed as muh nang, as I was unmarried at the time of my residence in the village. However, at the age of 28, I was considered an extremely old muh nang with highly doubtful marriage prospects. Muh nang continue to wear white dresses, which symbolize their virginity, until the time of their marriage. On their wedding day, they change to handwoven v-neck shirts and tube skirts in bright or dark colours (particularly red, black, and blue). Both types of outﬁts are woven with storebought thread, as homespun cotton is no longer considered beautiful. While everyone wears old torn clothes to the ﬁelds, teenaged girls spend many hours weaving dresses in the latest local styles just to wear on special occasions. Although to the untrained eye, the dresses may look the same from year to year, Karen teenagers note minute changes in the width and placement of the waistband, the type and height of patterns at the bottom of the dress, and whether or not long strands of yarn hang down from the waist.3 This fashion consciousness places a real burden on poorer girls, who struggle to ﬁnd the money to purchase the thread and coloured yarn necessary to weave new dresses and keep up with the trend-setters. Muh nang do not dare to visit the houses of teenaged boys in their village, and their mobility is more restricted than when they were younger. They are expected to spend their evenings at home, chatting with family members, taking care of younger siblings, and enjoying visits from young men. However, they can attend weddings and funerals in other villages, and they occasionally make trips to purchase goods or obtain something not available in their own villages. Such excursions often provide much anticipated opportunities to socialize with young men whom they would rarely see otherwise. Boys who have entered puberty and are unmarried are referred to as poh sae kwae. In the Ti Kree Say area, most get married between the ages of 16 and 20, slightly later than the girls. Few poh sae kwae in northwest Om Koi district wear handwoven red shirts anymore. Instead, they prefer manufactured t-shirts and long sleeved shirts which they pair with wide-legged blue cotton pants. Nevertheless, the male teenagers take as much interest in fashion and appearance as their female counterparts do, and this is expected by the girls. Until the 1980s, the boys let their hair grow long and twisted it into a rakish bun on one side, adorned with silver clip

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barrettes. They also wore necklaces and earrings and made up their faces for special occasions. From the early 1990s on, boys who are able to afford it have worn watches, which are purely for show rather than telling time. The boys purchase their clothes and watches in town, with money usually earned from wage labour outside the village or from the sale of livestock. By the early 1990s, few boys in the Ti Kree Say area still wore long hair or earrings, but all the male adolescents were as eager as the female adolescents to purchase facial powder and red lipstick. They applied the lipstick not only to their lips but also to their cheeks, making circles or patterns of lines. This practice began to die out as Thai ofﬁcials made more frequent trips into the area and laughed derisively at the teenaged boys for wearing make up. Poh sae kwae often visit girls’ houses in the evenings, and they tend to have more opportunities to travel to other villages, whether to help an older sibling during the planting or harvesting, to purchase a chicken or pig for a healing ritual, or to buy salt and other basic commodities. When they spend the night in another village, poh sae kwae also visit the girls’ residences, usually in the company of a local male friend. Some boys play hand-held harps when they visit girls’ houses, but this practice is no longer common. Mostly, the young people chat while the girls’ parents sit nearby. If the girl or boy is overly reserved, these social visits quickly become boring, thus young people of both sexes work hard to develop their conversational skills, including light teasing, story and joke telling, and general loquaciousness. To be known as someone who is anu aye, or loquacious, is positive and is valued in a romantic partner. Teenagers also spend much of their free time memorizing courting songs, so that they will be ready to participate in the courting rituals associated with funerals and weddings. These occasions will be described in the next section. Here sufﬁce it to say that, as in so many societies, Karen look back on their teenage years as the happiest times in their lives. Not only do Karen teenagers generally feel exuberant and excited about the future, but also they are not bound to the home by the demands of small children. Karen teenagers do have far more responsibility for their family’s economic survival than most teenagers in industrialized societies, but they are still free to leave those responsibilities occasionally to socialize and enjoy all-day or all-night celebrations with their peers. Long before a girl gets engaged, she will begin weaving the outﬁts she will wear after she is married. She will also weave items of clothing or shoulder bags as gifts for members of her future spouse’s family. Once she knows whom she is marrying, she can weave an appropriately-sized traditional red shirt for her husband to wear in the early days of their marriage. Although Karen women in the Ti Kree Say area continue to wear Karen-style clothing throughout their lives (but constantly innovate with colours and patterns), Karen men today generally wear manufactured t-shirts and baggy manufactured pants. They tend to wear the Karen shirts

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their wives weave for them only in the ﬁrst few months after their marriage. Once Karen are married, they are categorized as ‘old people’, with married women called muh shia, or old women, and married men, pu shia, or old men. Although newly married people may still be younger than some single people, what is considered appropriate behaviour for married and unmarried people is not the same. This boundary is often reinforced through jokes about married people who seem to be acting as if they were still single. Married people cannot participate in courting rituals, although they still sometimes hum or sing the courting songs to themselves as they walk through the forest or do work around the house. Also, it is not appropriate for married people to spend time talking alone to teenagers of the opposite sex. The change in dress for women visually marks them as offlimits to the amorous attentions of single men. For males, the transition to marriage can require uncomfortable adjustments, because they must usually move into their wives’ families’ houses. Accustomed to a fair amount of freedom and decision-making power in their own families, they must obey the dictates of their fathers-in-law and other members of their wives’ families for the ﬁrst few years of the marriage. If their own families live far away and they do not have other male friends in the village, they will tend to feel more ill at ease.4 In recognition of the difﬁculty of the transition, single people on the verge of marriage must symbolically let go of their former status by giving away presents to single friends. Girls often give away the jewellery and articles of clothing they will no longer wear once they are married, while boys generally buy small gifts in town. After a married couple has its ﬁrst child, the parents are no longer called by their ﬁrst names. Instead, everyone in the community refers to them as ‘mother of X’ and ‘father of X’. This linguistic practice celebrates the parents’ good fortune, and having a child is an important status marker, particularly for women.5 Nevertheless, it is also the beginning of hard years when the young family may have less to eat. Within a year or two after the birth of the ﬁrst baby, the new family moves to a small house of its own, close to the wife’s parents’ house but responsible for its own supply of food. Most of the time, the husband has to do the ﬁeldwork alone, while the wife stays home to take care of the little children and prepare food. There are more mouths to feed, but less rice because only one adult is farming full time. Life generally gets easier for the parents only when the children begin to reach adolescence and can work in the ﬁelds as well as help with other chores. With few outside pleasures besides talking to friends and enjoying their children, parents of adolescents often begin to live vicariously through their children as they begin to take an interest in the opposite sex. Many Karen romances begin at funerals, agricultural cycle celebrations, and weddings, and these events become the focus of attention for both teenagers and their parents.

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Occasions for pursuing romance Rituals are experienced differently by different participants, depending on various factors such as age, gender, and relation to the main actors (Rosaldo 1989; Bruner 1986). Here I want to focus speciﬁcally on the aspects of these commemorations and activities that relate to teenagers’ interests.6 Thus, while funerals are not happy occasions for family members of the deceased, for Karen teenagers living in the village of the deceased and nearby, funerals are greatly looked forward to. Indeed, the existence of elaborated courting rituals at funerals sets the Karen apart from other upland groups in Thailand.

Funerals Among animist Sgaw and Pwo Karen in many areas of Thailand and Burma, funerals are the high point of teenagers’ social lives. Teenagers in the Om Koi area attend approximately ﬁve funerals a year. They dress up more ornately for funerals than for any other event, and they spend endless hours while weeding or relaxing in the evenings memorizing the courting songs sung at funerals.7 Karen teenagers reminisce frequently about previous funerals and eagerly anticipate future ones, for it is during funerals that they hope to ﬁnd their sweethearts.8 As Paw Lay Pah (1990: 50) has noted in his autobiographical book about Sgaw Karen, ‘when someone died, instead of getting sad, we teenagers felt the opposite. We were happy, because we knew we would get to sing and stay close together for many evenings. It was the time that teenagers were most intimate.’9 Indeed, Pwo Karen teenagers refer to going to a funeral as li may tay or ‘going to sing’. Rather than wearing black or white in mourning, the teenagers wear their most brilliantcoloured clothes and most valuable jewellery. Generally 3-day events, funerals in the Om Koi area draw teenagers from as far as a 4-hour walk away. Many do not even know the person who died. The teenagers come to pair up with teens of the opposite sex and spend the entire night singing love songs as they slowly circle the corpse. Although no one could tell me how this practice originally developed, the joyous gathering of people helps to dispel the fear that animist Karen feel when someone dies. As Hamilton (1976a) has described, animist Pwo Karen perceive funerals as dangerous moments when the souls of the living and the dead may become confused. Indeed, when a pregnant woman died in Ti Kree Say, people were so afraid of the linked spirits of the mother and the unborn baby that no one dared to visit with the family for long or to sing around the corpse. The body was quickly disposed of with the most minimal ceremony. The presence of a corpse in the village represents danger, but if there are sufﬁcient numbers of people, the spirits will not harm anyone. To attract people to stay with the corpse and

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the family of the deceased all night, the funeral must be fun. The tradition of singing courting songs serves to draw a crowd and provides one of the few sanctioned venues for young people to meet. At the same time, the singing of courtship songs reafﬁrms the insistence of life even in the face of death. To give a sense of the excitement teenagers in the Om Koi area feel when they hear the news of a funeral, I quote a few paragraphs from my journal for April 1993. In the village of Ti Too Mai, an old widow, the grandmother of the headman, died the night of April 19th. By noon the next day, the news had already travelled to Ti Kree Say, which was almost a dozen kilometres away. The teens in Ti Kree Say were thrilled because some of the most sought after teenagers in the area lived in Ti Too Mai. But since they were busy preparing their ﬁelds for planting, most could only go for one night of singing. Figuring that the teenagers in many other villages might not get the news until the next day, they decided to wait and go for the second night of singing. They worked in their ﬁelds all day and returned to the village in the late afternoon to bathe and put on their best clothes. Just before sunset, eighteen teenagers set off along the mountain trail, including three girls aged twelve and thirteen who were going to sing for the ﬁrst time. A stunning sight, the group of teenagers were all dressed in their ﬁnest and most colourful clothes with tasseled shoulder bags swaying behind them. Talking animatedly, they wondered aloud about who would be there and whether they would get to sing with the person they desired. The last part of the journey was made in total darkness with some carrying ﬂashlights to guide them. When they approached the village, the entire group stopped for a few minutes to powder their faces, apply lipstick, and comb their hair. Then they proceeded silently down the hill and headed for the house where a relative of some of the teenagers lived. Upon arriving, they began asking the members of the family at the house about who had come from which villages. It turned out that teens had come from eight different villages, and there was a total of about 80 singers. This was a much bigger turn out than most funerals, and all the teenagers were overjoyed. Before the courting songs begin, two other sets of songs must be sung. First, the old men sing songs of blessing for the dead person. Then the young men join in and sing songs directing the corpse to the land of the dead. The corpse is told in no uncertain terms that it no longer belongs here but must go to the place where everything is upside down from the world of the living (for an excellent overview of the types of poetic songs that are sung at funerals and on other occasions, see Mischung’s Chapter

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7 in this volume). When visiting teenaged boys arrive at the village where the funeral is taking place, they immediately go and sing these songs. Girls merely leave offerings of betel nut and tobacco for the corpse and then proceed to a friend or relative’s house. Once their obligations to the soul of the dead person are ﬁnished, the boys head to the houses where the girls are waiting and begin the process of agreeing on dates for the night. Each person is allowed to request a ﬁrst choice and possibly a second choice, with all requests being relayed through the teenaged boys of the village where the funeral is taking place. Some matches are easily arranged, but when one person refuses to sing with another, alternate partners must be found. The process is further complicated by the fact that the teens cannot be partnered with members of the opposite sex from their own village. In addition, they must go in a pair with someone of their own sex. Thus, two girls from one village must be paired with two boys from another village. In the villages across the river from Ti Kree Say, the teens do not double up, so the process is simpler. In the Ti Kree Say area, it usually takes about 2 hours to make all the arrangements, and it is a tense time as the teens worry about whether the person of their choice will agree to sing with them or, in some cases, whether anyone will agree to sing with them. The number of females and males is not always equal, so inevitably there are disappointments. Males tend to outnumber females, so the girls who are not picked by anyone are particularly humiliated. They must spend the night at the house of their host, but in order to avoid embarrassment, they often sneak back home early in the morning before they are seen. The girls who are assigned partners begin reapplying their make-up and carefully tie from three to ﬁve contrasting turbans around their heads. About a half inch of each colour is visible above the forehead, and all the colours can be seen below the knot in the back. Some also place a band of iridescent-green beetle wings, carefully sewn together, across the front of their turbans. All adjust the many strands of beads they are wearing, both around their necks and slung diagonally across their chests and backs. They then arrange hand-woven red blankets around their shoulders to keep themselves warm and to pull up around their faces when they feel shy. The boys too take time to straighten up their clothes, comb their hair, reapply make-up, and reposition their hand-woven Karen shoulder bags and daggers decorated with hand-made tassels hanging at their waists. Finally everyone is ready and the courtship songs begin at about 9 or 10 pm. A group of teens forms a circle around the corpse inside the house, and other groups circle around piles of the dead person’s belongings in front of the house.10 Pairs of girls, walking stifﬂy one behind the other are proceeded by their male partners. As they slowly walk in circles, they begin to sing. The songs, which are all in verse, deal with love and longing. A common metaphor is that of birds meeting in the ﬁelds and ﬂying off together. Other songs refer to

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ﬂowers, nature, and the Karen lifestyle and the pleasures they evoke. For instance, Pay pah aow Bunoi sah mee Oh dah puh chuh Duh you see

Split open, A ripe jackfruit It’s so sweet It makes me think of you.

Bah juh sah Buah buh bree Jee taw jee law Po juh kee

You touch my heart, Delicate person, Going up and down (the mountains) Together with me.

or

Even if the singing partners are not in love, they enjoy expressing these emotions. However some feelings of anxiety are often inevitable, particularly when singing with a stranger. This is because the four-line verses of songs can be compared to problems with a limited number of solutions. When the girls sing a particular verse, if the boys cannot remember the corresponding response verse, they will be ashamed. Likewise, if a pair of girls runs out of verses to sing, they will be embarrassed. While young people create some new verses at home, none of the verses are improvised on the spot. Instead, verses must be memorized in advance. There can be more than one response verse to a ﬁrst verse, but the response verses are memorized as well. Nevertheless, there are generic verses, for example referring to doves calling to each other in the forest, that can be used as ﬁllers when the singers are at a loss for what to sing next. Anxiety also lurks just beneath the surface because a partner who is displeased with his or her match may begin answering the affectionate verses with rude rebuttals. For instance, a singer might intimate that he wanted the girl to come home with him to meet his parents, to which the girl could sing in response, ‘Why would I want to do that?’ Angered by the girl’s slights, the boy might ask a friend to cast a spell on the girl by using a strand of her hair or a thread from her dress while they are taking a break. Although I never heard of any such incidents during recent years, married women told me that this had certainly happened in the past. One woman claimed she had completely lost her voice because of such a spell, while others talked of spells that would make everyone see a girl as naked even though she would perceive herself to be clothed. The boys keep a close eye on the girls from their own villages and on the other male singers to make sure that this kind of problem does not develop. Periodically, the foursomes take breaks to rest, drink water, and chat. The girls bring hand-rolled cigarettes for their partners to smoke, and if

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there is a store in the village, the boys may buy sweets for the girls. The singing goes on until shortly after dawn. Then the teenagers sadly say their goodbyes, eat a few handfuls of rice and chilli paste or curry at their hosts’ houses, and make the long trek back to their villages. Upon arriving home, family members and friends immediately demand a full accounting of the matches for the night of singing before the weary singers are allowed to eat and sleep. Married people remember well how they felt when they were single and news of a funeral arrived. Like the younger generation today, they lived for funerals. In fact, many times when I was visiting married women in their houses, they pulled out their old hair clips and hair pieces which they had worn at funerals many years ago. The fashion styles have changed and hair pieces are no longer worn by the current generation of teenagers, but many women still could not bear to throw them away. It should be noted that some married men come to funerals to gamble, as this is the only time gambling is allowed in the Karen villages in the Ti Kree Say area. Married women, however, do not attend funerals outside their own villages. Many Karen communities in Thailand and Burma no longer engage in formalized singing and courting rites at funerals. As with Thai funerals, visitors come and pay their respects to the dead and may stay up all night to provide company for the family of the deceased. In some cases, teenagers assist adults in cooking food for the guests and serving, clearing, and washing the dishes. During their free time, the teenagers chat together and tease each other, but there is no ritualized courtship. Courting and the agricultural cycle In the Ti Kree Say area, most villagers continue to practise swidden cultivation, because there is almost no ﬂat land available for wet rice irrigation. While much of the ﬁeldwork during the agricultural season is strenuous and exhausting, broadcasting rice seeds after the ﬁelds have been burned off and cleared is a joyous occasion. Each family invites a number of households in the village to send representatives to the work party and treats them all to a meal afterwards. Families stagger their broadcasting, with the result that each teenager ends up participating in several days of broadcasting. Teenaged boys use long bamboo poles attached to metal blades to poke indentations in the ground. They often split the top ten inches of the bamboo so that the poles make a melodious clapping noise as they walk through the ﬁeld. The girls and women follow behind, dropping seeds into the holes. Once the entire ﬁeld has been covered, usually within a few hours, the work party sits down to a meal of curry, rice, and a bit of rice whisky by the ﬁeld hut, with the teenagers usually grouping together. Relatives or friends from other villages occasionally participate in the work party, and if the village is a big one, there will be plenty of

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young people chatting and joking with each other. After the meal, the villagers return home to take a nap or take care of other work. The rainy season is the most difﬁcult part of the year, when villagers must engage in back-breaking work day after day, often in the pouring rain. To weed an entire ﬁeld can take a good three weeks of constant effort. After a rest of 10 days, the family must start all over again. Teenagers make the tedious process of weeding more fun by frequently exchanging labour with friends. A teenager will organize a group of friends to weed with him or her one day, and then will repay the debt to each of those friends on subsequent days. As the teenagers weed, they often practise memorizing the love songs they will sing at upcoming funerals. If the harvest is good, the family is overjoyed, for families do not always obtain enough rice to cover their needs for the entire year. Regardless of how the harvest turns out, Pwo Karen in the Ti Kree Say area turn the occasion into a social event. Large work parties go out to harvest a family’s ﬁeld, with the men cutting the stalks while the women tie them in bunches. Husbands and wives work together, but other young people pair off in informal couples for the day. During breaks, young women often offer hand-rolled cigarettes and packets of betel nut and lime paste to their male partners and others, and all share in eating large juicy cucumbers which ripen at just this time. Often the single younger brothers of brothers who have married out of the village go to help their older siblings during the harvest. Thus, bachelors from other villages are available to pair off with the single girls from that village. While there is no private time, there is plenty of teasing and slightly licentious joking within the pairs as well as among the work party as a whole. In the larger villages in the Ti Kree Say area, perhaps a quarter of all marriages take place between couples who live in the same village, and occasions such as the harvesting and planting provide particularly enjoyable moments for courting couples from the village to be together.11 Two annual village celebrations tied to the agricultural cycle also provide opportunities for courtship. An re san ku, or feasting the village in the new year, is held sometime in January or February, around the time of the lunar new year. This is organized before the agricultural season begins and involves the killing and cooking of a large animal (a pig or a water buffalo, depending on the results of the divination done by the re ku, or village ceremonial head). Each household contributes money for the purchase of the sacriﬁcial animal, and the re ku, accompanied by male representatives from each house, makes an offering at the shrine of the village spirit above the village asking for the well-being of the village. The villagers then divide up the meat and cook hearty meals at their houses, inviting friends to celebrate with them. A similar ceremony, an leh kao, is held in July or August and marks the point in the agricultural cycle when the rice is about knee high. In this

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case, the request to the village spirit is speciﬁcally for a good harvest. As with the new year celebration, many guests come to visit and spend the night, allowing plenty of time for socializing and courting. Villages in the area stagger their celebrations so that people can attend the events not only in their own village but also in neighbouring villages. Most families brew rice whisky in advance, and villagers visit the houses of friends to eat and sip rice whisky together. Married and teenaged men often travel to friends’ and relatives’ villages to join in the festivities, and resident girls dress in their ﬁnest attire, looking forward to chatting with the single men and hearing news of friends in other villages.

Formalizing a romance After getting to know a girl at a series of funerals, weddings, or village celebrations, a teenaged boy may send her a present of cloth, beads, or some other kind of jewellery. The gift may be accompanied by a love letter, written in poetic verse, which she will not be able to read. Because usually only males learn to write in Karen, and only for the purpose of writing love letters and songs, girls must ask their brothers or cousins to read the letter to them.12 The verses will usually be cryptic, requiring a fair amount of time to be spent deciphering the intended meaning (see also Mischung, this volume). Then the girl has to decide how she will respond. If she likes him, she will likely send something (usually a large bunch of hand-rolled cigarettes) back with a trusted male friend travelling to that village. Soon after, the possibility of a marriage may be explored through intermediaries of the parents on both sides, with the bride’s side usually initiating the discussions. The intermediaries will consider the feelings of the teenagers themselves, as well as the feelings of the parents. During the courtship period, teenagers, like their parents, will seek to determine whether a potential mate is healthy and a hard worker. But the teenagers will also be inﬂuenced by the warmth, friendliness, and good looks of the other sex. These considerations often overlap, as young men in the Ti Kree Say area deﬁne the ideal woman as one who is plump rather than waif-like. Many young men said they were attracted to the heavier girls because they were healthy and strong and clearly had enough to eat. Assuming both sides acquiesce to the match, a date for the wedding will be set. However, in public, the bride and groom and their families often deny the engagement to prevent embarrassment should the other side suddenly call the wedding off. Nevertheless, it is difﬁcult to hide the reason why relatives of the two families are making visits back and forth and so the engagement is usually an open secret. The families of both the bride and the groom must inform the other villagers at least 10 days before the wedding is to take place so that the women of the village have time to brew rice whisky for the guests.13 This is

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because the wedding celebration involves not only the family and close friends of the bride and groom but everyone in both villages. Animist Karen marriages affect the whole community, as the new couple must establish a relationship with the village spirit (duh jong), which has the power to punish anyone in the village for the crimes of another villager. At the same time, the villagers are expected to refrain from work that day and be on hand to welcome the guests and demonstrate how hospitable their community is. The wedding ceremony Weddings usually take place in the cold season after the harvest has been reaped but before the planting is done. This is the period when the villagers have the most free time, and there is also plenty of rice on hand for preparing whisky and feeding guests. Like funerals, weddings provide opportunities for teenagers to spend time together, although the participants are largely limited to members of the bride’s and groom’s villages. In the Ti Kree Say area, weddings take 2 days with a big celebration held the ﬁrst day in the bride’s village and a slightly smaller celebration held the second day in the groom’s village. Early in the morning of the ﬁrst day, the groom, his family, some of the married men and children, and most of the teenagers set off for the bride’s village, which may be anywhere from a half-hour to a 4-hour walk away. Close relatives from other villages will also come to join the festivities. The teenagers in the bride’s village get dressed in their ﬁnest clothes and wait for the guests to arrive. The children start banging on drums and cymbals as soon as it becomes light, and the groom’s party can hear the music as they make their way toward the bride’s village. The groom’s party also brings drums to play periodically during the journey as an indication of the party’s progress. When the groom’s party approaches, the teenagers and married men in the bride’s village meet them at the edge of the village, where they welcome them joyously. Each teenager, female and male, carries a small bottle of whisky and a small teacup into which he or she pours drinks for the visitors. The teenagers group together in one area, while the older men sit together on mats a little bit closer to the village entrance, singing the ritualized arrival songs for weddings (may tay chinang). The visiting teenagers may at ﬁrst appear to be shy and nervous and partially shield themselves from view with umbrellas. But after a few cups of whisky and warm compliments from the hosts, everyone relaxes and proceeds into the village. The groom is particularly feted during his party’s arrival, but the bride does not participate. She is waiting nervously inside her house. When the guests enter the village, the groom is led to one house where he must wait until he is called to perform the wedding rituals. Meanwhile, the other visiting teenagers fan out to the house of the bride and the

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houses of their relatives and friends, where they relax and catch up on local news. Children continue to march around playing the village’s set of musical instruments. At the bride’s house, family members and relatives prepare the food, while the male village elders preside over the ritual aspects of the wedding. For instance, when the pig is slaughtered, the gall bladder must be examined as it represents an omen of the couple’s life together. If the gall bladder is shrivelled, another pig must be killed, for only a round gall bladder can signify a smooth and prosperous marriage. Later that morning, the groom proceeds in a procession with his friends to the house of the bride, where he must offer a tray of speciﬁed gifts to the bride and her family. It is customary for a group of males related to the bride to turn down the gifts saying they are not good enough, and the groom must retreat. Only on the third attempt to present the gifts will the bride’s family accept them. This practice makes visible the tensions that precede the wedding, when neither family is sure whether the match is a good one, but ﬁnally the doubts are resolved with the full acceptance of the groom’s offerings. Then the bride and groom must go out to a bamboo pavilion especially erected for the occasion to participate in a ceremony, in which the re ku (village ceremonial head) and other village elders inform the spirit of the village that a couple is being joined in marriage. The re ku and village elders offer the spirit whisky and pork, and then the bride and groom make offerings of whisky and hand-rolled cigarettes to the elders, the symbolic keepers of the village. Later in the day, the bride and groom must sit in the bride’s house and have a village elder announce the wedding to the bride’s household spirit. The elder then ties strings around the couple’s wrists as he blesses their marriage, and the couple shyly feeds each other pieces of a chicken specially sacriﬁced for the ceremony. After more blessings and whisky, the groom leaves his bride’s house and does not return until late that night, when she has changed from her white dress into the skirt and shirt of a married woman. During the afternoon, everyone joins in the whisky drinking and feasting. Indeed, going to a wedding is called li an tu, or ‘going to eat pork’, and at a minimum, a large pig will have been cooked, with part of the meat used for the ritual and the rest for feeding the guests. If the bride’s family can afford it, they will purchase a cow and cook the beef into a curry for the guests as well. As the children continue to bang on their instruments, teenaged and young married men often start spontaneously dancing to the music after having consumed several cups of whisky. The married and single women also drink some whisky, but generally in much smaller quantities than the men. It should be noted that when the teenagers and adults drink whisky, they do not down an entire cup themselves. Instead, the cups of whisky are passed back and forth in a ritualized pattern to create bonds of friendship. The pourer of the whisky offers the cup to a visitor, and after the

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visitor takes a sip, he or she hands it back to the pourer. The pourer then takes a sip and hands it to the visitor again. The visitor then passes the cup to others who are present. Each person takes a sip, handing the cup back to the pourer. The passing of cups continues like this, with the original recipient ﬁnally taking the last sip and handing the cup back to the pourer. This complicated pattern of passing cups ensures a degree of physical contact between everyone present, which creates an atmosphere of intimacy and warmth. Needless to say, when the cup is passing back and forth between a boy and girl who are infatuated with each other, the feelings can be particularly charged. That night, the couple is allowed to stay together for the ﬁrst time. There is often much teasing of the couple by the teenagers outside the house, but eventually they depart to engage in their own romantic pursuits. While the older men pair off in fours (two guests and two hosting villagers) to sing ritualized songs and discuss local politics, the teenaged girls prepare for the visits of the young men. The hosting girls wait at their homes while the female guests gather at one or more houses. Two males from the host village lead two male guests to the resident girls’ houses and vice versa. The girls offer hand-rolled cigarettes and small cups of whisky to the boys, but only after they sing their requests in poetic verses. There is much cheerful bantering back and forth before the young men move on to another house. Each visiting male can request to be taken to the houses of two or three of the host village girls whom he fancies, with the result that popular girls get many more visits than others. During weddings, jealousies are sometimes aroused, especially as the host village girls watch the guys from their village paying a great deal of attention to the visiting girls, and the visiting girls watch the boys from their village ﬂirting with the host girls. For teenaged boys, the courting rites are primarily about meeting and deepening acquaintances with girls, but the young men also solidify their friendships with each other. Because two host boys are paired with two guests, each pair depends on the other for access to the girls of the other village. The morning after the celebration in the bride’s village, the groom and his fellow villagers walk back to their village, followed soon after by members of the bride’s village. When they arrive at the groom’s village, the guests will be greeted with whisky outside the village, and a ritual will be held to propitiate the spirits and inform them about the newly married couple. A pig will generally be roasted, but rarely will there also be a cow or water buffalo. In the evening, the teenagers will again stay up most of the night sipping whisky together, chatting, and making jokes as they sit around the ﬁre at different girls’ houses, while the girls’ parents keep a watch on the interactions to make sure that no one acts inappropriately. Over the next 2 weeks, the newly married couple will travel back and forth between their parents’ villages at least two or three times. In the village, they will rarely show much public intimacy other than sitting close

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to each other, but these journeys through the jungle together afford them a chance for some privacy.

The limits of romance Despite the events described above which provide opportunities for ﬂirting, the behaviour of the Ti Kree Say area teenagers is quite tame by current Western standards. They generally do nothing more than talk, sing, exchange gifts, and dream of each other. This is because of the belief that the spirits would wreak vengeance should unmarried couples engage in physical intimacy. Sex before marriage is considered a grave offence to the spirits, and the spirits may punish other family members or other villagers for the crime by causing a bad harvest, illness, or even deaths in the community. As a result, the village elders exact severe punishments on couples daring to violate this prohibition.14 Moreover, both teenaged boys and girls expect their partners to be virgins at the time of marriage. While love marriages are the ideal, arranged marriages are not uncommon. They are seen as acceptable options when love matches do not pan out, and some wealthier families arrange marriages for their children very early in order to ensure that they marry someone of equal status. However, the teenager may resent this if he or she has no interest in his or her prospective partner. Whether it is a love marriage or an arranged marriage that goes awry, it is also generally quite difﬁcult for the husband and wife to divorce. Although there are cases of divorce if the husband or wife violates the village norms, the elders in the community will usually work hard to persuade an unhappy couple to stay together. Once a person is divorced, remarriage can be difﬁcult. Most men are reluctant to marry a divorced woman for fear that the ﬁrst husband (or spirits connected to him) would make trouble. If the ﬁrst husband remarries, other suitors will be less worried, but precautions are still taken. For example, the daughter of the headman of Ti Kree Say was forced into an arranged marriage when she was barely 16, and she talked bitterly of being cheated of the carefree days of single girls who can go off to ﬂirt and sing at weddings and funerals. Although her husband was wealthy and attractive, she did not love him and found the marriage unbearable. Soon after the wedding, she began having strange ﬁts, pounding the walls, screaming, and running around outside late at night. This was considered particularly noteworthy as women are afraid of being attacked by ghosts and spirits if they wander around at night. Her behaviour was interpreted as resulting from spirit attacks, and she and her husband were made to perform numerous ceremonies both together and separately to purge the troublesome spirit. Nothing seemed to work, however, and ﬁnally the marriage was dissolved. The headman’s daughter soon returned to normal, although she would cry bitterly whenever other young women went off to

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funerals to sing, because she was not allowed to join them. When she married again 5 years later, a private ceremony was held in secret at night. This was clearly an attempt to make sure that spirits of the ﬁrst husband did not somehow derail the wedding. Because most Karen maintain the ideal of a love marriage and generally only have one partner in their lives, young couples in love are prone to take extreme measures if their marriage plans are thwarted. If parents try to block a match, the boy, or both the boy and the girl, may attempt suicide. In 1992–1993, only one couple in the immediate area tried to kill themselves, but their parents caught them in time and relented. However, the villagers told me of several double love suicides in the past, some by hanging. In his autobiographical account, Paw Lay Pah (1990: 52–54) talks about how his best friend committed suicide with his girlfriend. His friend was poor and did not know how he could take care of a wife, so he and his girlfriend did not admit their romance to their parents. When she got pregnant because of their illicit sexual activity, the couple killed themselves by drinking whisky mixed with opium rather than face the wrath of the villagers. The usual reason parents block love marriages is because of a difference in the socio-economic status of the teenagers’ families. Parents generally do not want their child to marry someone who is appreciably poorer than them, but this line of reasoning does not carry much weight with lovestruck teenagers. Despite the tragedies that sometimes occur when parents refuse to allow a couple to marry, marriage in Karen society is generally based on the consent of the bride and groom. While the marriage may be arranged, the parents will rarely push it unless both the bride and groom are willing. Once a couple is married, there is no discussion of second wives or tolerance for adultery. Animist Karen adhere strictly to monogamy, and this again relates to a concern with the spirits. Spirits are possessive and easily angered, and maintaining good relations with the ancestral and territorial spirits demands the utmost respect for their rules (for a more detailed discussion of the relationship between Karen spirits and sexuality, see Hayami’s Chapter 6 in this volume). Adultery is understood as offensive to the household and village spirits and can even result in an entire village being punished with a bad harvest. In cases of adultery, both offenders are punished and may be banished from the village. To have two wives at the same time would also be impossible because of competing spirits. Ancestral spirits from the wife’s line inhabit each hearth, family rice barn, family mortar and pestle for dehusking rice, and family clump of bamboo trees. These spirits are believed to attack anyone who intervenes in their territory or violates the established sexual norms. Family members could be made ill and even die. Fear, then, motivates a commitment to monogamy, but animist Karen in the Ti Kree Say area also assign a positive value to monogamous relationships, which they see as dis-

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tinguishing them from other groups. Men in the Ti Kree Say area often talked derisively of Hmong men who had more than one wife, saying what a crazy practice that was. And no Karen parents in the area wanted their daughters to marry Thai men because of their reputation for engaging in extramarital relationships. The fact that the household spirit is linked to the wife and her family also clearly inﬂuences understandings of marriage. It is the wife’s ancestral spirit, rather than the husband’s, which inhabits the home and must be appeased, and in times of serious crises, it is the spirit of the wife’s matrilineage who must be sought out. The oldest living woman in the mother’s line is responsible for propitiating this spirit, called duh muh kray in Pwo Karen.15 Moreover, children of both sexes grow up propitiating the spirit of their mother’s ancestors.16 Thus, the wife often has a signiﬁcant say in decision-making, for she is the owner of the house, and she can always warn that an undesirable action might upset her spirits. In addition, it is virtually impossible for a widowed husband to remarry until his children have left the house, because the new wife’s spirit and the former wife’s spirit, still cultivated by the children, would conﬂict (Hinton 1984: 341). Thus, the wife plays a central role in the household and in order for the family to be prosperous and healthy, the husband must generally cooperate with her.

Romantic practices among more educated and Christian Karen Teenage fashion and courting rituals in Karen villages closer to Thai towns have altered in response to Karen villagers’ greater exposure to the dominant culture. As noted above, most young Karen men now cut their hair short, in keeping with current Thai styles, and they wear far less jewellery and no make-up. Moreover, young Karen men have stopped tattooing their upper legs and waists in an intricate pattern of tigers and daggers, because this too is currently seen as uncivilized by most Thai. Before the 1980s, girls would only marry young men who boasted the beautifying tattoos, and males often walked around with their pant legs rolled up to show off their designs. Today, some Karen men still seek out protective and magical tattoos for the upper part of their bodies, but these have no direct romantic appeal. Courting rituals have been most dramatically affected in areas where village children and young teens spend their days in school rather than in the ﬁelds. They do not have the time to memorize the courtship songs, and they are inﬂuenced by the practices of the Thai communities around them. Funerals in their villages much more closely resemble Thai funerals with gambling and socializing but no teens pairing off to sing together. Moreover, Karen who attend classes through high school tend to develop friendships and romances through their acquaintances in the classroom

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or in their workplaces after leaving school. Some will end up marrying Thai and assimilating into Thai culture, while those who marry fellow Karen will also bring their experiences in Thai-run institutions into their new families. Given that Thai often look down on Karen as backward but are quite accepting of Karen who speak, dress, and act like Thai, Karen in frequent contact with Thai are often motivated to reject Karen practices and follow the mores of the dominant society. Many Karen have also converted to Christianity, and Protestant missionaries generally discourage Christian teenagers from singing the courtship songs. As we have seen, the singing of the courtship songs is often entwined in life-cycle ceremonies which relate to beliefs in spirits. Missionaries usually encourage a major reworking of such rituals to ﬁt Christian beliefs and practices typically associated with their home communities. Thus, wedding and funeral ceremonies are held in churches and do not incorporate romantic singing. Nevertheless, Christian Karen teenagers have adapted. For instance, in parts of Lampang Province, Pwo Christian Karen teenagers gather on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve to spend most of the night singing carols in surrounding villages, giving them a chance to interact with other teenagers. Similarly, in refugee camps and towns along the Thai-Burma border, Karen teenagers often spend several nights before Christmas carolling until daybreak. The night before weddings is also devoted to the singing of love songs popularized by pop stars, often accompanied by guitars and sometimes performed on makeshift stages erected in front of the bride’s house. Church services, church choirs, and other activities for young people also provide opportunities for youth to get to know each other.

Conclusion Animist Karen swidden cultivators face difﬁcult lives fraught with fears of wrathful spirits and frequent insufﬁcient harvests. Yet, the various elaborated practices associated with romance in Karen communities reﬂect the creativity with which Karen villagers have turned tedious or unpleasant occasions into eagerly anticipated activities. Broadcasting seeds, weeding, and harvesting are all made more pleasurable by the creation of work parties to carry out the labour. At the same time, animist Karen have turned funerals into the primary occasion for youth to meet and socialize. It is not only the teenagers who enjoy these opportunities to work and sing together. Older people also take pleasure in watching a new generation of youth develop their talents in weaving, working the ﬁelds, composing songs, and singing as they seek to attract the admiration and love of members of the opposite sex. Karen courtship practices in many ways reﬂect Karen gender relationships in married life. Both during the courtship and after marriage,

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females are treated as partners with a chance to speak their minds, albeit in a more reserved manner than males. Both female and male Karen are consulted before their dates are arranged for the singing during funerals. Female Karen are also allowed to drink alcohol (and smoke tobacco and chew betel nut), although they usually consume far less than males do. In addition, it is the parents of female Karen who often initiate marriage proposals on their daughters’ behalf, once the parents are sure that their daughter likes a certain young man and he appears to like her. Karen women and men are understood as having complementary roles. Each gender has its own responsibilities and duties, with males playing a more public role. Thus, because they are primarily responsible for the purchase and care of livestock and for earning extra money through wage labour, male Karen have more opportunities to travel than females both before and after marriage. Likewise, Karen men settle public disputes and village-wide problems. On the other hand, Karen women have control over the money they earn from the occasional sale of chickens and pigs and generally make the ﬁnal decisions on household matters. Karen who have given up animism and are more integrated into Thai society not only court the opposite sex in different ways but may also reconﬁgure gender relations once married. The role of the wife in propitiating the household spirits is often eliminated, and some husbands no longer fear engaging in extramarital sex, because they no longer believe in the power of household or village spirits to punish them. Karen females may in fact lose status in their relationships with males as they assimilate into Thai society. In conclusion, Karen courtship practices and gender relations are inextricably linked, and they shift in relation to the community’s religious beliefs and norms of behaviour. In this essay, I have focused on the courtship practices of animist Karen and the central role of courtship songs, which are one of the most elaborated aspects of Karen culture. Today, the number of Karen youth who still memorize and sing these songs is dwindling, as Karen courtship, marriage, and other social practices have been reworked in connection with Karen decisions to alter their religious practices and adopt many of the customs of the dominant culture. Further attention should be given to Karen courting customs, which naturally attract the interest of outside observers but have been largely overlooked in the scholarly literature. Particularly deserving of further study are the courting songs, which manifest the Karen worldview, including the links between the natural and human worlds and the relationships between the sexes. Because the practice of memorizing and singing these poetic songs is in the process of dying out, the task of recording and analysing them is even more urgent.

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Notes 1 Paw Lay Pah, a Sgaw Karen from the Mae Jaem area of northern Thailand, writes about teenage romance in his book, The Pwakanyaw, which was translated and published in Thai by Kanlaya and Veerasak Yodrabum. Karen villagers in Thailand and Burma today continue to tell folktales that revolve around teenage courting rituals and double suicides by young lovers who were forbidden to marry, but this is little documented in any language. One exception is Elizabeth Hinton (1999) who has translated Pwo Karen tales told in northwest Thailand into English. Jarat Maiyot (1995) has recorded some of the Sgaw Karen verses used in rituals and translated these into Thai, but he does not cover the courtship verses. 2 I am grateful to Claudio Delang for his helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 3 In 1992, the girls in Ti Kree Say village stopped wearing the style of white dress usually associated with Pwo Karen in northwest Thailand. Such dresses are partly embroidered in thick red cross-stitches and adorned with long red threads hanging down from the chest. They currently use much less embroidery, but the hanging threads and decorative stitches around the edges of the dress are done in a wider range of colours and patterns. 4 Newly married couples in the Ti Kree Say area only settled in the husband’s village when there were no daughters to take care of the husband’s parents. Wives deﬁnitely considered this a hardship. 5 Hayami (1992: 356–357) emphasizes the importance of fertility and motherhood in according status to Sgaw Karen women, and this is equally true of Pwo Karen women. Still, the teenaged years are generally looked forward to and remembered as the most enjoyable years. 6 See Fink (1994) for a consideration of the politics of hospitality at Karen weddings, funerals, and agricultural celebrations. While the teenagers are mingling, adults engage in feasting and ritualized singing to deepen social ties, project status claims, and reinforce identities. 7 The songs are not easy to learn, because they are sung in Sgaw Karen, even though all the villagers in the Ti Kree Say area are Pwo Karen. Since most of the villagers cannot speak Sgaw Karen, they tend to slightly change the pronunciation of the words, making it difﬁcult for anyone but themselves to understand what they are singing. It should also be noted that the singing style varies from area to area. Ti Kree Say is located on a high ridge above a river valley, and on the other side of the river, the singing style is much more operatic, with the singers holding notes and warbling their voices rather than sticking to a basic melody. Many of the Ti Kree Say villagers practised both styles of singing and were therefore able to attend funerals on both sides of the river. 8 Marshall (1922: 176) notes that Karen teenagers in Burma in the early 1900s also often met and developed their relationships at funerals where they sang together. Sarapi Sila and Vichien Kacha-anan (1987: 3–4) make the same point about Sgaw and Pwo Karen in Thailand in the 1980s. 9 My translation from Thai to English. 10 Because the ancestral spirit of the woman resides in the house, women are considered the owners of houses. When women die, their corpses remain in the house during the funeral, and their houses are torn down afterward. During the funeral, the front wall of the house is removed to afford easier access. The corpse is wrapped in blankets and a mat and is placed lying straight out, perpendicular to the hearth. A pole goes from the corpse up to the roof of the house, symbolizing the connection between the spirit of the house and the spirit of the dead woman. When it is time for the burial, the

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pole is cut and the house torn down, severing the connection. Male corpses are placed on a platform in front of the house, and the house is not torn down unless the man was living alone. Hinton (1999: 78–79) retells a Pwo Karen folktale from northwest Thailand which also talks about the pleasure young people in love feel when harvesting together. Ti Kree Say area villagers use a modiﬁed version of the Pwo Karen script developed by missionaries in Burma. This script is based on the Burmese alphabet. Older male teenagers teach younger males how to write. Many men forget the script after they get married, unless they use it to write down songs sung on other occasions. Some men never bother to learn it. A few girls learn some of the alphabet, but most are not encouraged to do so. Among animist Karen, whisky is always brewed by women, as the rice which is used is believed to be possessed by the woman’s ancestral spirit. Sarapi Sila and Vichien Kacha-anan (1987: 5) wrote about a Karen girl in a village in Lamphun Province in the 1980s who had to perform a ceremony to appease the village spirits after her affair with a lowland boy was presumed to have led to the death of several villagers. That she had had an affair was determined by having all the unmarried girls in the village present a handful of sticky rice wrapped in a leaf to be boiled. Whoever’s sticky rice didn’t boil within the prescribed time period would be presumed to be guilty. After no one’s package boiled the ﬁrst time, and all were put in the pot to boil longer, this girl could no longer stand the pressure and admitted what she had done. As more and more Karen teenagers spend time working in lowland towns, however, there are more opportunities for them to engage in premarital sex without others in the village knowing. It should be noted that in Kawthoolei, the area which roughly corresponds with the borders of Karen State in Burma and used to be largely under the control of the Karen National Union, Falla (1991: 255) reports that 15–20 per cent of couples pay a ﬁne for having engaged in pre-marital sex at the time of their wedding. Hinton (1984) spells this term ther myng khwae. However, when a child falls ill, rituals may be performed for the spirits of both the wife’s and husband’s ancestors. As noted by Rajah (1984: 351–352), if a healing ritual is performed invoking the husband’s ancestors, the husband’s mother and father will come from their village to perform the actual propitiation rite.

6

Morality, sexuality and mobility Changing moral discourse and self Yoko Hayami

In modern-day Thailand, some ‘hill tribe’ groups have been voyeuristically depicted as sexually liberal, and their women are also said to be obedient and compliant to men’s needs. Such images derive from lowland male fantasies towards the ‘other’ multiplied by commercial interests of tourism (Toyota 1996). In the same context, however, among Karen, also counted among the ‘hill tribes’ both in Thai administrative contexts, tourist industries, and by lowland Thais in general, maidens with their white tunics have been associated with purity not only among Christian Karen but also in tourist pamphlets and general lowland knowledge.1 While such images are merely another version of the exotic hill women as objects of male fantasy, the story of the morally straight Karen dates as far back as 200 years ago. A British observer from as early as the mid-eighteenth century says of the Karen, ‘they are remarkable for their perfect morality, but have no apparent religion’ (Captain George Baker of the East India Company wrote in 1759, cited in Theodore Stern’s Foreword to Hamilton 1976b). Other early reports by the British also refer to the ‘peaceableness, honesty, and goodness’ of Karen (Sangermano 1995 (1833); Andersen 1923; Baldwin 1948). Subsequently, among American Baptist missionaries as well as British administrators in the nineteenth century, Karen were depicted as moral yet humourless people, the latter depiction deriving more from the nature of the observer’s relationship with the Karen than from any essential Karen characteristic. While missionaries in other parts of the world struggled with the ‘amoral’ and stubborn customs of the natives, the Karen were found to be monogamous. A cursory look at the Karen family will certainly give a picture that does not differ greatly from the monogamous nuclear family in the industrialized West, with which most colonial administrators as well as missionaries were familiar at home.2 Western missionaries in nineteenth-century Burma found among Karen an ideal family where love and sexuality is conﬁned to the monogamous marital bond. Karen were seen as curious hill people with Victorian morals. There seemed to be no need to teach the monogamous marriage practice and the loving family. What do we ﬁnd behind this outward resemblance of Victorian family and sexuality? The impact of Christian

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missionizing among Karen is not a straightforward implanting of the contemporary Western Christian morality as we shall see below. Stoler criticizes Foucault for ignoring the role played by the nonWestern ‘other’ as objects in the construction of the Western sexual subject, in spite of his insights into the subtle operation of power in promoting the discourse of power (Foucault 1979, Stoler 1995). This selfother relationship where the sexuality of the self is realized and deﬁned by relationship with the other takes place repeatedly not only in the Western vs. non-Western relationship, but also in other relationships involving the construction of ‘otherness’, such as between the Thai and the non-Thai hill dwellers. Bishop and Robinson refer to this phenomenon as the ‘inﬁnite regress of otherness, in which they [customers at the Chiang Mai Night Market] get to experience the hill tribes as the ethnic Other of the exotic Other’ [my italics] (1998; 93–94). Discourse of sexuality is constructed mutually in such self-other relationship. In seeking to understand the dynamics of sexuality among the Karen in Thailand, a series of questions emerge. How do we understand the discourse of the sexually prim Karen who constitute the ‘other’ in Thai society, a society which itself has been entrenched in the discourse of sexuality as the ‘other’ for the West? Given that the Karen have been constructed as the morally upright people both by the West and by the Thais, how then can we compare the sexuality and morality among Karen as opposed to that of the industrialized West? In any case, so little has been written about the sexuality of the other’s other. In what ways then was ‘sexuality’ referred to or represented among Karen? We will ﬁnd that just as sexuality plays a crucial role in deﬁning West vs. non-West relationship, sexuality is not only crucial to understanding inter-ethnic relationships, but in some ways deﬁnes them. Furthermore, we will see that changes that bring on increasingly strong state apparatus and the globalized market (where sexuality itself becomes a commodity) affect and alter that relationship. In this chapter, I address the changing discourse on ‘sexuality’ in the context of the dynamics of Karen positioning in the hills of Thailand. I discuss how ‘sexuality’ – which I put in quotation marks since there is no Karen term that remotely corresponds to it – is embedded in varied other discursive contexts. Far from being prim and humourless hill people, life and conversation in a Thai Karen village is rich with sexual banter and connotations. What is interpreted by Westerners as codes of morality and sexuality is embedded in the communal practice of maintaining social, natural and cosmic order, while the monogamous family is sanctioned in family ritual and its varied attending rules. Transgression in sexual activity is solved by communal rituals or otherwise ultimately by expulsion of the culprit from the community. Discourse of immorality is couched in terms of spatial mobility and crossing ethnic boundary. I argue that the community-based sexual morality is jeopardized by changing communal

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practices and show how the emphasis has shifted as mobility, especially to urban centres, has increased. There are three points I want to make in looking at changing discourse on sexuality and morality in hill Karen society within the dynamic process of incorporation of Karen communities in the Thai state and global market economy. First, discourse on the sexual morality of women and that of men differ, especially regarding practices outside the community; second, changing contexts of the discourse of sexuality have accompanied the changes in the community and the relationship with lowlanders as well as the Thai state. ‘Hill tribe women’ become visible and desired objects, and with increasing mobility, the women themselves must seek ways of working between moral codes of the hills on the one hand, and the desiring gaze of men they encounter in the city or anywhere they become an object of the self-other gaze. Finally, it is not so much that the basis of morality has become individualized but that the multiple discourse allows women some alternatives, even if each alternative comes with its own constraints. The monogamous emphasis, matrilocal residence pattern, equal inheritance with tendency towards daughters’ inheritance, and importance of women in both the ritual and social sphere in the village provide autonomy for Karen women. It is, therefore, not my intention to dig out ‘oppression’ from the hill communities, but to reveal certain double standards that operate in the lives of Karen women, and from there to seek the various ways in which they cope with them.

Sexual breaches and the solution: the forest lawyer Despite missionary appraisal, breaches of sexual morality were not infrequent in Karen communities, even those which are considered ‘traditional’, i.e. where authority of elders is maintained and ritual for the spirits is practised in full. Where breaches take place, they must be resolved communally. I met and interviewed Puhomau in September 1999. He was an older man in his seventies in a village in Khun Yuam. Very well travelled, he had lived in Chiang Rai, Chiang Dao and Pai in his youth, had been logging with elephants in Burma, and had learned the art of dancing and use of magical spells in the forest which are the kinds of lore that Karen medicine men (s’ra) are well attuned to. After he settled in the present village and married, he converted to Baptist Christianity, even though already at the time he had become well-known as s’ra, with abundant knowledge of spells and other lore.3 He was eloquent and knowledgeable in practical and mundane matters as well as in esoteric lore and had become well-known for his ability to settle matters of sexual transgression. As a youth explained to me in Thai, ‘he is something like kotmaai moradok’ (heritage lawyer). Below are his accounts of some of the incidents where he was summoned to solve problems.

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You know, I wouldn’t tell this one if there were youngsters or maidens around. Years ago, a man came to consult me. But he sat and sat and would not speak. I told him to speak up and he said ‘I don’t want to. Tae teu mu ba [literally I am not happy/comfortable to talk].’ He sat until midnight, and I said ‘is it you want to smoke opium? Then smoke. If you want to talk, then talk. Otherwise, I will go to sleep.’ So we smoked together. ‘If you don’t want to talk, then why did you come to me?’ So he ﬁnally answered, ‘I can’t work, I can’t eat, I can’t do anything because of my worries. Every night my wife comes to me and she says “Ever since we were married, I have slept under you. Just once, I want to go on top.” She gives me this problem, even though she is now so old her blood has dried up.’ So I answered ‘well, I’d really like to help you but what can I do? Every person has problems, but yours is different from others. Do you have pigs underneath your house? If there are, ask your wife to fetch one and to bind your wrists.’ ‘But we do that often in my house.’ ‘No this time, it’s a little different. This time, don’t let any of your children in. Just between you and your wife. Then pound some rice cakes and cut it into twenty-three pieces and call the k’la (the soul). Then perform the liquor-drinking ceremony by yourselves. When all is ﬁnished, call your family and kinsmen for the feast. Then after dark, go to bed with your family, and when the children have fallen asleep, make love to your wife. You must go on top and your wife underneath as man and woman. If you do otherwise, then things will go wrong. You will not be able to work, and you will have no harvest.’ In the villages, there is no lack of sexual banter, although most direct references to the sexual act concern those between married couples. Men would tease neighbours about the noise at night, or joke about how one’s own wife ‘rules the house at night’. However, as in the above case, sexual behaviour considered to be abnormal, even between a marital couple, could become an issue to be brought to a knowledgeable elder and could otherwise affect the fertility and productivity of land. Sexual activity outside of the marital bond becomes a problem for the community. Beu refers to an unresolved breach of such a sexual taboo. If a person burdened with beu is unable to resolve it, then that person must leave the community forever. Puhomau narrated cases where he had helped out where beu was involved. A young unmarried man went to the swiddens with a widow to plant rice. They worked very hard. Then the woman slept on that side, the man on this side of the hearth in the ﬁeld hut. Then the woman said at night ‘there’s a ghost. I’m afraid. Let me come over to your side.’ She came over and said ‘hold me’. The man refused and she said ‘I’m fond of you’. Every night she came over to hug him, to touch his penis

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Verbal persuasion together with communal pressure is used in solving problems of non-compliance. The sexual act itself seems to be envisioned as being carried out by the initiative of both women and men and both parties must be responsible for its consequences. On another occasion, I was called to Muphokhi village. There was an older man who already had a big family with children and grandchildren and lived in a large house. His wife was deceased and his children went to get their aunt (his brother’s widowed wife) to live with them. After a while she became pregnant. The village headman went and told the man to marry her. For three years the headman continued to persuade him, and for three years he continued to refuse. They summoned me. But I was much younger than this man. I couldn’t tell him. How can a younger man tell an elder to do or not to do things? I went to his house, and talked with him on a mat [a proper way to welcome respected guests]. He told his son to go and get some liquor. While his son was gone I said, ‘if we get drunk we won’t be able to talk, so let’s first talk. Uncle, you are older, and I am still young. You are more knowledgeable. But as things are, everything will be destroyed. The trees and bamboo in the forest, the animals, everything. We are pga k’nyau [meaning both Karen and human], and if we do such things everything will go wrong. Children, youths, elders, the same. Elders have knowledge. They can do things. If they can’t walk, they can use walking sticks.’ ‘I see. If you talk to me like that, I understand. People came to tell me for three years, but I never felt like listening. They all said to me “you’re old. Your penis won’t stand, your eyes are full of mucus, your chin is falling, just give up and marry her and she’ll take care of you!” Who wants to listen to such words! But if you speak to me like that, I

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listen. I will marry her.’ So he killed two water buffaloes and held a large wedding feast. Puhomau undoubtedly told these stories to amuse us, but they certainly reveal Karen notions of sexual moral and social order, how women and men are understood to take part in the act and take responsibility, and how moral codes are enforced in the village. Even the details of a marital sexual intimacy could affect the land and crops. Human sexual conduct is thus related to the social order of the community, the natural and the supernatural surroundings so that sexual breaches among Karen could be critical to the productivity and well-being of a community.

Communal sanctions Even though Puhomau is himself a rather exceptional man, every community has its own group of elders who will see to it that sexuality as a crucial component of the community social order is controlled. One of the most important rituals that the community ritual leader hi kho (literally village head) performed was the ritual performed after an extra-marital liaison took place. This usually happened when an unmarried maiden became pregnant, or more generally, where pre-marital intercourse or adultery were said to have taken place. The hi kho of the woman’s community performed a ritual of ‘making cool’ (ma khiu) or ‘making good’ (ma ge ta). Otherwise, the land would be ‘hot’ (ta ko), or ‘strong’ (ta chu) and there would be illness and bad harvest in the entire community. This is how the ritual was held, according to several elders’ accounts. If the offending man is from outside the village he must sacrifice a water buffalo, and if he is a local, a pig. A pot of water is boiled with acacia pods which is used by the couple to wash the hi kho’s hair, as if the hi kho himself must be cooled and purified or as if cooling and purifying the hi kho is effective in cooling the heated land. A bamboo tray is filled with salt, chilli, tobacco, and other offerings, and the washing of hi kho’s hair is performed over this tray so that the water falls on the offerings. This tray must be carried either by a postmenopause woman or a man without offspring, in either case nonreproductive persons, and discarded in the forest. The culprits walk around the village with the sacrificial animal accompanied by the hi kho and villagers. The hi kho kills the animal and prays to the guardian spirit of the land as he pours the blood of the animal into a hole dug in the ground to ‘cool’ the land. The woman provides seven bottles of liquor and all men in the community participate in the feast over the sacrificial animal. In case of pre-marital intercourse the two must then be married, and the culprits’ parents must also undergo the wrist-tying ceremony, as ‘their souls are endangered by their children’s misconduct’. The heat and disorder in the land caused by the spirit’s anger towards

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the culprits are thus dissolved and order restored by the cooling by and of the hi kho. The fact that the ritual is performed in the woman’s community is signiﬁcant. Even though both men and women must undergo the ritual, it is the woman’s sexual transgression that is relevant to the community and must be controlled communally. Now let us look at the wedding ceremony: the crucial rite through which a couple’s sexual activity, framed within the marital bond, becomes at once permissible and desirable. The 3-day Karen wedding also takes place in the woman’s community. It begins when the bride’s community welcomes the groom and his people at the entrance of the community. Elders from both communities pray together with libations of liquor which they pour on the ground for the guardian spirit. Then careful ritual steps are managed by elders. The bride and groom perform a tentative family ritual on the ﬁrst morning before dawn; then the groom, who maintains a temporary lodging in another house, would step by step be welcomed into the bride’s house until the ﬁnal entry into the innermost section of the house; all the while male elders will be singing traditional wedding verses, praying to the guardian spirits, pouring libations; the ﬁrst wedding pig is slaughtered and its head will be hoisted above the threshold of the bride’s house to notify the spirits that the couple are now married; and the bride changes from the maiden’s white dress into the married woman’s costume of red skirt and black shirt. All of these careful measures serve to sanction the couple as married, and they spend 3 days and 3 nights in the bride’s house, and stepping out of it is taboo. It is to be noted that such elaborate weddings are performed only in cases of the woman’s ﬁrst marriage. The full 3-day wedding is a ceremony that sanctions the beginning of the woman’s sexual activity. If it is her second marriage, even if the man is married for the ﬁrst time, the wedding ceremony will be a simple wrist-tying. The wedding, in other words, marks the beginning of a woman’s reproductive activity sanctioned by the community and spirits. In a rather embarrassing episode from my early ﬁeldwork days in Sgaw Karen villages in Mae Chaem District in 1987, I myself had to undergo this wrist-tying wedding. The episode well illustrates how sexual morality is relative to each community. During the ﬁrst two months of my stay, I had a friend-cum-interpreter who accompanied me to the village, to ensure smooth entry. He was a young Christian Karen from the city. We sometimes stayed in non-Christian households. In one village with a respected ritual leader (hi kho), I stayed overnight on the terrace of one of the houses with my friend the interpreter. We were there to observe some rituals. When the rituals were over and we were ready to leave, the hi kho invited us to his house, and he killed a chicken and performed a wristtying ritual on our behalf. Having ﬁnished, he turned to us and announced, ‘now you are properly married’. This took me completely by surprise. I protested that I was already married and could not possibly be

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married again. The hi kho assured me that it was not for me to worry about, but that his village would not be in peace unless he did this, since my friend and I had slept under one roof. With all of the pressure and frustration of the early ﬁeldwork stage mounting on me, I was totally vexed, utterly embarrassed, and felt I had blundered terribly. It was later that I found out that two Thai teachers (man and woman) who had come to stay as a part of adult literacy education and had to stay in one house (even though they were respectively married) also had to undergo the same ritual before they could leave the village. The spirits of the land would be angered unless this procedure was taken. It was the unwritten communal law. There are various implications in this episode which led me to understand better some crucial aspects of Karen practices for maintaining order within the community and revealed to me the nature of order that is crucial to the community. First, since no Karen maiden was involved, they did not/could not enforce upon me the cooling rite, even if they thought there was a definite breach. The only way to resolve the possibility of a breach by a stranger was to conduct a simple wedding of wrist-tying. Moreover, while such rites were quite strictly practised within the community, it was completely relative to the community. To me, the fact of a double marriage seemed to be more problematic than the fact of a man and woman staying overnight under the same roof. It was not so for the Karen villagers. The double marriage was not a problem for them since the other marriage was far beyond their own realm and outside the control of the spirits. My personal condition of ‘double marriage’ was not a problem for the community, especially since I am neither Karen nor a local. It was first and foremost the possibility of the immoral act itself that may have taken place on the community land that mattered. Another important ritual, which can be performed only by married couples for their families, frames reproductive activities within the family context. Once married, a couple begins a family ritual called au xae (see also Iijima 1971 and Rajah 1986). I have elsewhere analysed how this ritual constitutes a crucial part of the family’s reproductivity (Hayami 1998), but here I will emphasize that the au xae ritual marks the married couple, the woman and man, as a singular entity. This, then, is the basis of monogamous coupling for Karen which so impressed the missionaries; while sexual relationship outside the marital bond is the realm of communal ritual order, the monogamous marital bond is reinforced by and sanctioned in this family ritual. Double marriages between Karen and divorce are rare due to the powerful sanction of the family ritual. Today, in most Karen communities, the rituals, both the communal cooling to redeem a sexual transgression, as well as the family ritual that reinforces the marital bond, are losing importance in deﬁning and controlling sexual and reproductive activities. Communities in which the

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cooling rites are performed are becoming rare. In fact, I have never observed the cooling rite – not because there was no breach, but because there was no hi kho (ritual leader) to perform it in my ﬁeld village, as all potential candidates for the position, i.e. descendants traced patrilineally from the original hi kho, had converted to Christianity. Now, nonChristian villagers have nobody to perform the cooling rites for them even when a sexual transgression is recognized. For this reason, there is a general feeling of moral degradation among villagers. In fact, in this particular community, the deaths of the two last hi kho were related to crises brought on by sexual breaches: in the end, the community lost its hi kho and centre of social and ritual order. The following is an account of how it happened. The son of the original hi kho died in unusual circumstances when he was still in his forties. He was performing the cooling rite after sexual transgression in the community in which he allowed a pig with a bad gall bladder to be sacriﬁced. (In any ritual involving the sacriﬁce of pigs, Karen check the shape and colour of the gall bladder for signs of inauspiciousness.) According to villagers, the elder who checked the gall bladder and gave the approval to sacriﬁce it in the ritual lost his eyesight soon after the incident, and the hi kho himself died suddenly. The community moved eastward to a new location and the young son succeeded as the third hi kho. In just a few years, however, he also died. Again villagers spoke of unusual circumstances surrounding his death. He had himself committed a breach of taboo with a young woman from a nearby community. As the story goes, the hi kho of her community who performed the rite of restoring order was mentally unstable and had not been able to conduct the rite properly. Immediately after the rite, the young hi kho died. The death of this third hi kho left the community without a successor by the late 1970s. Now the non-Christian villagers acknowledge a loss of moral control: ‘when X married, she was pregnant. The baby was almost side by side with the head of the pig killed in the wedding feast.’ Christian conversion was deﬁnitely one of the factors which led to the discontinuation of the hi kho’s and other rituals. Once converted, the family ritual, which deﬁned the monogamous family as a reproductive unit, is also discontinued. In some ways, rather than Christianity bringing sexual moral and monogamous family to a heathen amoral society, one might say that Christianity brought in effect a deterioration of sexual sanctions based on rituals on both the communal and family levels. Ironically for missionaries, Christianity was seen from the non-Christian Karen, to be the source of moral degradation. Being Christian exempted anyone from the communal ritual practices including the cooling rites, and the increase in conversion meant the community was no longer an effective ritual unit. Furthermore, Christian youths were the ﬁrst to leave the village for study in the lowlands, where they acquired habits of the city and of Thai society. Christian women tend to be more mobile and deemed less

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sexually accountable. In effect, the discourse of sexual morality embedded in ritual practices ceases to be constraining.

Sexual transgression and ethnic boundary The system of resolving sexual transgression may come to a standstill in the case of transgression that crosses ethnic boundaries. We have seen that sexual morality is embedded in the communal social order primarily of the woman’s community. Matters are settled within the community, or between Karen communities with shared understanding of the processes for amending the breach. What happens, then, when a breach takes place with those for whom such sanctions are meaningless? The cooling ritual and subsequent marriage cannot be enforced. In pursuing this question, we ﬁnd out that the consequences are widely different for women and men respectively. When a travelling Karen man transgresses with a non-Karen woman, the transgression will remain unresolved. Marlowe describes a young Baptist Karen man who had been married four times and had innumerable mistresses. His wives and lovers had all been either Northern Thai or Thai. The reason the man gave for this was as follows: As long as I marry Thai girls and sleep with Thai girls it’s all right. I can divorce them or leave them. It doesn’t matter. Now one day when I am ready to settle down I will marry a Karen girl in church. But you must understand, when I do that, that’s it. I can’t ever get divorced, or leave her, or play around again. That is why I keep away from Karen girls. Someday I will marry one and that will be it. But not yet. I’m not ready for it yet. (Marlowe 1979: 74–75) Similar talk was often heard among Karen men in my study area. Youthful adventures were something they could boast about as long as it took place outside Karen space, with non-Karen women. Marlowe’s man can eventually return to his village and marry a Karen woman without problem. A Karen man who is known to have a wife in Chiang Mai can, without much criticism, take up a Karen bride in the hills. Temporary liaison with a Northern Thai woman is considered to be free of problems because for the man it does not accompany the breach of moral sanctions in the Karen community, and also perhaps is considered, from the point of view of the Karen man, to be less harmful for the Northern Thai woman than for a Karen woman, and therefore ‘easier’, legitimating their exploitation. The same would not apply for a woman. In cases where inter-ethnic transgression involving Karen women takes place, villagers would attempt to apply the usual system to resolve it. If the

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transgression takes place within the village, the cooling ritual would be performed, followed by enforcement of marriage, and even in cases where it takes place outside, there will be an attempt to force the couple to marry. The consequence is that while there are indeed some Karen women who have married travelling Northern Thai or Shan and have a family, some of them have been abandoned by their travelling ‘husbands’. The departure of the husband leaves the woman in an ambiguous position where she is married yet without a husband, and without the chance to carry out proper ritual procedures for divorce.4 As one Karen youth claimed, ‘no Karen man will marry a girl once taken by a yau (Northern Thai)’. As Kunstadter also points out: Marriages between Karen women and Northern Thai men are usually thought to be short lived and thus potentially disgraceful for the Karen [that is, for the Karen woman], who do not believe in divorce. Lowland Karen have told me that one reason they want their daughters to marry at an early age is to be sure they are married before they have a chance to have an affair with one of the Northern Thai who may be wandering through the village. (Kunstadter 1979: 145) Liaisons with non-Karen men might turn out to be irredeemable as communal sanction of sexual morality (the cooling rites and subsequent marriage) cannot be enforced upon them. In my research community, there had been cases where women in the village married non-Karen and lived as Karen families. In two of these cases, the non-Karen husbands abandoned their Karen wives and the women later remarried second husbands who were also non-Karen. There were many other cases of Karen women marrying non-Karen men and bringing up Karen families in the past as attested by the fact that some villagers professed that their grandfathers were Shan, or Northern Thai. Needless to say, even for cases of transgression that occur well outside the community, women will remain silent rather than be boastful of their ventures as the men would be. The moral sanctions regarding sexuality in Karen villages render Karen women vulnerable towards non-Karen men. A liaison, which might be temporary from the point of view of lowland men who exploit the Karen woman’s sexuality, will have a permanent effect on the course of her life in the village. The hazards of such liaisons both for the woman and for the community lie at the basis of sanctions and limitations on women’s mobility. Yet, from another perspective, we have seen that the same sanctions legitimate Karen men’s exploitation of non-Karen women. It is due to this difference that, even though there is no clear division of labour between men and women around the house, their spheres of activity differ markedly. At least until educational opportunities increased for Karen in the hills, mobility patterns of men and women differed signiﬁc-

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antly. Women’s daily lives and associates did not differ greatly before and after marriage, and their lives were primarily deﬁned within the village sphere. A woman should not walk in the forest alone. The reason given for this is that women are weaker, and therefore much more vulnerable to the spirits and animals of the wild forest. The evil spirits of the forest include ‘Northern Thai men’. Women who roam freely out of the village are endangering themselves not only to wild animals and spirits but to the sexual advances from Northern Thai men. The only women who walk in the forest without such dangers are older women past reproductive age. Women who wander out of the village without speciﬁc purpose may often be referred to in derogatory tone as a ha na jau (she wanders badly). When Thai visitors enter the village, women maintain distance as much as possible. Even those ﬂuent in Thai or Northern Thai language would feign incompetence and refrain from speaking to outsiders, and if they did speak, there would be some gossip in the village. A woman who speaks casually to non-Karen strangers will taint her own reputation as being too eager. Even so, travelling was not completely restricted as women enjoyed dry-season trips to other Karen villages and markets, accompanied by male relatives. There are acceptable ways for women to travel. Meanwhile, it is expected of men to walk (ha) farther, with or without purposes of trade or work. Young unmarried men do not have any place to sleep in their parental houses except the outermost terrace. They roam both within and outside the village. Men are free to travel and associate with the world beyond the village, and through mobility and travel they will ﬁnd their marriage partners and future residence, acquire the necessary information and network to enhance their positions within and outside the community. In this section, we have seen that the basis of sexual morality is constantly jeopardized by relationships with outsiders who do not share the same norms and practices. In a sense, one might even say that those who do not share the same practices are ‘non-Karen’. Those Shan and Northern Thai men who have married into the Karen village and stayed are, in the words of the villagers, ‘just like Karen’. In the hills, discourse on sexual obsession or what they deem abnormal sexual conduct is invariably attributed to non-Karen peoples, primarily the Northern Thai, or the urban Thai, and women’s conduct and morality are recounted in terms of their selfprotection against those with such different practices. Karen construct their own discourse of the ‘other’ in terms of sexual practices, and furthermore, such discourse may become pretext for Karen men to exploit the sexuality of the ‘other’ women, just as it renders their own women vulnerable.

Mobile women negotiating sexuality and morality Mobility is certainly not a recent phenomenon among Karen. Either to trade and barter or to visit other Karen villages, there was much travel in

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the hills, and these travel experiences became basis for long-term movements from one community to another. Today, however, the latter type of long-term movements have decreased owing to population pressure in the hills, while travelling to lowlands, especially the city, seeking educational and labour opportunities, has increased. National integration in Thailand has proceeded by incorporating the peripheries as peripheries in spatial, administrative and socio-economic order. With improved infrastructure and gradual ﬁltering of the media, images of the urban centre are beginning to ﬁlter into the peripheries, bringing increasing awareness of the gap. These newly emerging patterns have also led to reinforcing and modifying the discourse on sexual activities across ethnic boundaries. At the same time, the increase in cases of urban migration itself undermines the community-based morality that had been a restricting factor for women’s mobility.5 It is only since the 1980s (and 1990s for women) that the mobility of Karen youths from the hills began to show conspicuous increase, both for education and for labour.6 During the economic boom in the 1980s and early 1990s, luxury hotels and condominiums were constructed as the tourist industry boomed, globally franchized fast-food stores ﬂourished and gasoline stations were opened on every street corner to feed the everincreasing number of vehicles in the northern capital of Chiang Mai. These and the construction work for such infrastructure absorbed young labour from the hills. In the hills, means of communication and transportation improved, bringing not only the administrative apparatus and market economy, but information, goods, and basic utility such as electricity. Life in the hills has undergone changes with the constant trafﬁc of people, goods and information from the lowlands. With the onset of cash economy, prosperity and progress are measured in terms of material gains. The impact of tourism in constructing visible images of the ‘tribal women’ has been quite pronounced (Toyota 1996). Added to this is the widening economic gap between the lowland city-dwellers and those in the periphery. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the brothels in Chiang Mai were associated with tribal women initially, and then increasingly also with the dangers of HIV. While the percentage of Karen women in sex work is said to be low, the image of the Karen virgin in the white dress might be said to be a reverse image of the tribal sex worker, providing another object of desire. Even young women who stay in the hills are included here. Recently in my ﬁeldwork area there has been an increase of marriage, between Northern Thai men and Karen women, sometimes as mia nooi (minor wife). The men visit Karen villages to seek the young women, who they consider hard-working, less demanding and meeker than Northern Thai women. Once I entered a Karen village in a truck driven by a young Northern Thai man. He observed after a quick tour through the village, ‘not many white dresses in this village’.

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From the point of view of the Karen villagers, this was all the more reason to be wary of their daughters going to the city. A young Karen woman who has gone to the city and was lured by the sexual advances of men in the city is said to have ‘fallen’ (lau tae). Deterrents for girls moving to Chiang Mai were many. Life in the city is strongly associated with degeneration of sexual morals. Sexual dangers are related in horror stories about girls from nearby villages regarding their unwanted pregnancy, contracting AIDS, or involvement with prostitution. The threat of AIDS has especially become acute, and even though from this area the victims have been primarily men and their wives, the rare case of an unmarried girl contracting AIDS has become a favourite narrative used in dissuading girls from going to the city. The government-sponsored Karen radio station also cautions young Karen girls from going to the city without accompanying reliable elders. There was a radio skit that was played repeatedly about a young girl (who does not speak Thai) who is lured by another Karen girl (a city girl who speaks fluent Thai) to the city and is deceived by the latter into prostitution and returns to the village HIV-positive. Moreover, girls in the city are often criticized for moral degeneration, forgetting their daughterly responsibilities, thinking only about their own desires and consumption, what they wear, how they look, how to enjoy themselves and so on. Urban experience also has signiﬁcant inﬂuence on the age of marriage. Whereas in the hills, the age of marriage has become extremely low so that girls well into their twenties who are not yet married are under much pressure, going to the city can become a way to evade such pressure. At the same time, however, it also brings in another kind of pressure, that of defending their reputation. In the face of increasing objectiﬁcation of the sexuality of women in the hills, how do women negotiate the norms and stigma which often come with mobility with regard to sexual morality? Among Karen in the hills, there is no more stress on educating sons than daughters, at least up to the secondary level. Villagers are seeing increasing examples of educated Karen women earning salaries through work as teachers, health workers, development workers or workers in the Christian organizations or NGOs: in other words, respectable jobs that allow them to stay among their own people and receive salaries. Education is a means of increasing such opportunities. Furthermore, it may be that girls are more eager to study because education provides a respectable reason for leaving the hills which boys do not need. Most begin by attending night school while working during the day, staying at reliable homes as housekeepers or in Christian dormitories which are increasing their capacities to meet growing needs. Such facilities, or the presence of Karen relatives or older co-villagers in the city, makes their urban sojourn more accountable. The kinds of jobs in which Karen girls are involved in the city include maids, school errands, services at gas stations, hotels and restaurants, factory work, and hospital help.

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When I interviewed young students in Chiang Mai City about their future prospects, many of them responded at least initially with what seemed to be the normative answer, saying ‘When I ﬁnish school I want to return to the hills, ﬁnd a job near the village, marry a Karen man, and look after my parents.’ However, there were those with longer experience in the city who had found out that they were sometimes forced to choose from among limited alternatives, and that they would have to take responsibility for those choices. A rather painful choice is to cut one’s ties with the village and therefore also with the community-sanctioned morality of the hills as much as possible and become a city person. This was the choice made by a 23year-old woman from a Buddhist Karen family 30 kilometres north of Chiang Mai city. She graduated from high school in a town in that region and then came to Chiang Mai. After working for 2 years and saving enough to pay her own tuition, she started a 2-year night-school course to obtain a college degree and works as a waitress during the day. She had a Karen boyfriend she met in the city whom she thought she would marry. However, the man chose to marry a girl in his own hill village and left her to return home. She referred to this experience saying ‘he wanted a “real Karen bride” ’, as if to say that she herself did not qualify as a ‘real Karen bride’ since she has been living in the city and acquiring urban tastes, working like a Thai woman. Now, she claims, she prefers to go out with Northern Thai friends, and once she obtains her degree, she would ﬁnd a better paying job in the city. She returns home once every few months for an overnight stay only to see her parents. From her experience she has re-evaluated her distance to her natal Karen village and to life in the city. Another choice is to remain within Karen religious associations in Chiang Mai, which would render one’s life in the city accountable and respectable. There are Christian dormitories as well as clusters of Christian Karen families in Chiang Mai which provide lodgings for Christian youths. Women from the hills who stay in these quarters tend to be those who maintain good contact with the hills. Whatever lifestyle one leads in the city, higher education in the city for women from the hills is at once an escape from the pressure for marriage which begins at an early age in the hills, and also a factor that delays their marriage. All of this means that their status upon their return to the hills tends to be quite ambivalent: they are usually older than the average marriageable age when they return, and better educated and experienced than many of the men of eligible age. Just as the hill women in the city reﬂect upon and modify their distances to the village, so does the returned woman in the hills reconsider her distance to the city. One way to fend off criticism is to remain silent about one’s urban experiences and live as a woman in the hills, seeking ways to fulﬁl one’s aspiration within respectable limits. A young mother in my ﬁeldwork village in the 1990s was one of the most well-travelled women

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in the community, yet she would never speak Thai (which she could speak ﬂuently) in the village. In interviews with me, however, she was eager to share the little information and vignettes of her life in the city and of her boyfriends, both Karen and non-Karen. She spoke of the joys and freedom of travelling and adventure in youth and repeatedly claimed that in spite of all the freedom, she never seriously considered marrying a non-Karen boyfriend, to which her own mother was adamantly opposed. She married a Karen man who took her to Bangkok where they worked together, then returned when she had her ﬁrst baby. She hopes that once their sons are of schooling age, the entire family would move to the city for their children’s education and for her and her husband to work. She is studying for a high school degree at the adult education course given at the local school every Saturday. No doubt the number of young women heading for the cities is growing, and as the number of returnees increase, such cautiousness as the latter case will become unnecessary. Some returnee women dare to challenge the village moral codes upon their return from the city, bringing in some of the urban lifestyle, while others cope with the divide by maintaining silence about their urban experiences. In a Christian community which had been sending girls for education in Chiang Mai city from earlier in the 1980s, I met a 28-year-old graduate from the Teachers’ College, one of the ﬁrst women to have gone to the city for higher education. Upon return to her village, she chose to live a lifestyle quite anomalous in the village setting: in a house by herself rather than with her parents, where she receives friends from the city both male and female. Even though she is highly respected among young Karen women from the hills in her village, as well as those who are currently studying in the city, among others in her own natal village she is the object of frequent and vicious gossip. Villagers speak of her free ways in derogatory tone, and she has become an often-cited case of the hazards and demerits of girls receiving education in the city. However, with ﬁltering images of the modern urban woman, in the long run, she has become a pioneer among returnee women, and even as she was the forefront of gossip and criticism, she has set an example, an admirable one for those to follow, and a disagreeable if inevitable one, perhaps for her critics. Whereas men can, as they always have, come and go between cities, villages or other regions without gaining stigma but rather acquiring a mark of maturity, for young Karen women today, crossing the divide towards urban experience is at once risky and provocative. These women are constrained by the codes of sexual morality of the villages, and perhaps also in the city, and must protect their reputation amidst various pressures. Sexual morality couched in terms of spatial and ethnic transgression is being negotiated by increasingly mobile women. Here, morality and sexuality is no longer a matter of communal order, but a gateway to and constraining factor in the choice of individual life course.

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Conclusion The control of sexuality and reproductive activities in Karen communities was embedded in practices of communal and family rituals and efforts by elders (represented by the ritual leader) to maintain social order in the community. However, the communal codes of morality and the enforcement of solutions could not be applied to those who do not share the codes. Because of this, women’s sexuality must be controlled more stringently vis-àvis non-Karen men. As ritual order both on the community and family levels is undermined due to changes in ritual and religious practice (such changes themselves being inseparable from greater socio-economic changes), sexual morality within the community is also less stringent. Yet, at the same time as discourse of controlling women’s sexuality vis-à-vis non-Karen men is becoming more pronounced, increasing numbers of young women seek educational and labour opportunities in the city and bring themselves in contact with non-Karen men. In the urban-based media and culture of sexuality enhanced by the tourist industry, women from the hills become the objects of desire. The basis of discourse on morality and sexuality has shifted from the community, to the wider inter-ethnic context and further to urban Thai culture. As far as urban experience and women’s ‘fall’ is concerned, even as it is perceived as a non-Karen experience from the point of view of the hills, ethnic difference becomes less relevant. A ‘Karen’ man is just as likely to cause her fall as any other. In this process, they must negotiate the moral demands of the Karen community as well as the desiring gaze of the non-Karen men. They are forced to make certain choices and decisions, and such choices in turn gradually change the moral codes that they could have been at odds with. Can we then say that these mobile women are individuals who are now free from the community-deﬁned morals to make their own choices? Or that the moral basis has become diversiﬁed and individualized? The choices available in making these decisions were certainly not those that were available 20 years ago. The de-communalizing of sexual morality does not mean individualizing, but that the availability of multiple discourse has opened up space for negotiation and alternatives. However, one might also say that the women are choosing one form of constraint and pressure rather than another. The availability of multiple choices does imply that decisions will be made with reﬂection upon the conditions and consequences of these choices, and through the process, gradually change the constraints and/or ﬁnd ways to negotiate them.

Notes 1 A rather curious difference exists among the Karen in the hills of Myanmar, where even though married women wear almost identical tunics to these of the Karen in Thailand, and unmarried girls wear the white one-piece dresses, there

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is no association between unmarried maidens and white. Women wear the red skirt and shirts decorated with Job’s tears from before marriage. Ritual-practising Sgaw Karen families are either nuclear or maternal extended families where one married daughter and her family lives with the parental family. Regarding the use of spells among Karen and the power of s’ra, see Hayami (2002). The ritual implements, the sacriﬁcial livestock must all be discarded, and payment must be made from the husband to the wife. Mills discusses the double standards regarding men and women’s labour migration in the context of northeastern Thailand, and the factors that have spurred young women’s urban migration (1999). The concern for the control of young women’s sexuality is common with the Karen case. However, in the Karen case, there is an added factor of differentiating discourses along ethnic lines. According to a study carried out in 1981 (Vatikiotis 1984: 200), at the time, the number of hill youths living in Chiang Mai was estimated to be 700 (not including the dormitories), out of which Karen numbered only 100, an extremely low ratio considering the Karen constitute half the hill population. In another study carried out 5 years later, which pointed out the rapid increase in the number of hill youths in the city, it was estimated that 80 per cent were men (Renard, Prasert and Roberts 1987: 34). Later, in the 1990s, there were several students’ dormitories managed by Christian organizations within the city: more for women than for men. The Catholic dormitories have instituted a system whereby women from the hills would stay in these dorms situated within the grounds of Catholic private schools, work at school errands during the day, and study in the night schools. In the past 5 years, their capacity has increased two and a half times, and of all the women, more than 70 per cent are Karen.

7

When it is better to sing than to speak The use of traditional verses (hta) in tense social situations (Example of a marriage ceremony in an upland Sgaw village, Chiang Mai Province) Roland Mischung

Introduction: the ethnographic case The hta verses that will be presented and discussed later in this chapter were tape-recorded in March 1982 during a wedding in the Sgaw village Mû Kä Klô (Doi Inthanon massif, Chom Thong district of Chiang Mai Province). In fact, I had already witnessed two or three Sgaw marriage ceremonies before, but I had never managed to document them beyond the initial stages due to problems with the principle of ‘participant observation’. There had previously always been too much ‘participation’ on my part during the early stage (social drinking), with the natural result of a severely limited capacity for ‘observing’ the culturally meaningful parts of the ceremonies some hours later. As far as I am concerned, this was largely inevitable, given my social position in the village. In March 1982 I took advantage of the presence of a visiting German ethnomusicologist (Gretel Schwörer-Kohl) who, being a woman and only a temporary guest, was less constrained by the kind of social obligations alluded to above. She was therefore both physically capable and willing to record a series of hta that she happened to witness in the late afternoon on the ﬁrst day of the marriage ceremonies. Having heard hta sung at previous weddings as well as New Year celebrations and a variety of other occasions, I was quite aware of their cultural importance. These verses were regarded as the authentic speech of the remote ‘ancestors of the olden days’, the knowledge of which formed one of the most prominent markers of a person’s identity as pga k’nyau (‘Karen’). Their recitation was mandatory at a number of important events. However, when I later analysed the meaning and discussed the social context of the hta that had been recorded at this particular wedding with some of the participants, I became aware that the singers had not just been following a custom for the custom’s sake. Rather it turned out that

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those hta had been quite deliberately chosen in order to deal with actual situations at the wedding which were considered (potentially) critical. Subsequent inquiries revealed that in most cases the recitation of hta, no matter whether sung or spoken, served a set of closely interrelated purposes: • • •

to express sentiments or convey messages of fundamental importance; to express sentiments or convey messages that could not be communicated otherwise (e.g. in ordinary language); to establish basic social or political claims that could not easily be contradicted by an opposition or rival party.

In sum, the use of hta seems to be culturally appropriate (and on certain occasions prescribed) whenever the subject matter to be expressed is of basic social importance or considered highly controversial or delicate. In the latter cases the conventions of ordinary language use and social etiquette may not allow for what one wishes to say, so that the intended statements require a medium that is vested with exceptional authority.

‘Dyadic speech’ in Southeast Asia A conspicuous formal feature of Sgaw hta is that the majority of them consist of couplets, i.e. of pairs of parallel verses that are nearly identical (for more details on formal structure see below). This technique of reduplicating whole verses is an extreme variety of a widespread linguistic phenomenon, often referred to in the literature as grammatical/stylistic ‘parallelism’ or ‘dyadic speech’. This apparently is a common characteristic of traditional poetry in many parts of the world, with the possible exception of Africa (Fox 1988a; Jardner 1999). In mainland Southeast Asia, for example, forms of parallelism have been recorded of Vietnamese, Burmese, Mon, Thai, Shan and Garo (Fox 1988a: 6–11; the author also mentions ‘Karen’, however without identifying the source(s) upon which this assertion is based). The more detailed or ‘thicker’ descriptions of ‘dyadic speech’ deal with cultures of insular Southeast Asia, notably Indonesia (e.g. contributions in Fox 1988; Jardner 1999). These are particularly relevant in the present context, as they reveal a variety of interesting parallels to Sgaw Karen hta. According to Fox (1988b: 176), ritual language on the island of Roti is characterised by a strict canonical parallelism. This means . . . that . . . all elements must be paired. In formal terminology each individual element must form part of a ‘dyadic set’. In composition dyadic sets produce parallel lines whose overwhelmingly most common poetic form is the couplet.

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This description seems to apply to all ritual languages of eastern Indonesia discussed in Fox 1988, although most of them have a less strict formal structure than the Sgaw hta (varying length of verses, in many cases absence of end-rhymes). The effect of ‘speaking in pairs’ seems to be perceived in similar ways throughout the region. For example, the statement of Karen informants that the doubling of verses makes formal speech ‘more beautiful, complete and meaningful’ is clearly echoed by the opinion of the Toraja, according to whom the verses recited by their priests ‘must be full, made powerful through the repetition of words and images’ (Zerner and Volkman 1988: 288). For most parts of insular Southeast Asia, dyadic speech marks the distinguished status and the extraordinary authority of solemn recitation. In eastern Indonesia, as among the Sgaw, the origin and therefore authority of traditional poetry is, as a rule, attributed to the ancestors. The following observations on poetic (dyadic) speech on the islands of Sumba and Roti may serve as examples: The couplets are seen as the ‘words of the ancestors’, and are accorded unusual status and authority through their use in the formal expression of traditional values, precedent and custom law. (Hoskins 1988: 31) The formulaic utterances of ritual language are regarded as ancestral wisdom. A chanter is thus the medium of an authoritative cultural voice which speaks decisively at the beginnings and ends of sequences that deﬁne an order to life itself. (Fox 1988b: 190) Among the Atoin Meto of western Timor the laws of adat, expressed in epic recitations, and also composed of parallel verses, refer to actions of the ancestors in the remote past. The authenticity of these poetic traditions is strongly felt, to the extent that a single wrong word in ritual speech is likely to result in sanctions by the ancestors ( Jardner 1999: 60). Traditional dyadic verses in this region are, in addition to their function in religious rites and the recitation of myths and clan histories, also used for certain formal interactions between social groups, where they may even be the prescribed medium of communication. Generally speaking, their inherent authority makes them suitable whenever culturally fundamental claims or socially delicate topics are raised: It is a linguistic convention in eastern Indonesia that social wisdom and indeed signiﬁcant knowledge of a ritual sort must be expressed in dual terms – in a binary or dyadic form. (Fox [1980], quoted in Mitchell 1988: 66)

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[In eastern Indonesia], ritual language constitutes an elevated mode of discourse that is able to give public voice to what might otherwise be unspeakable. (Fox 1988a: 13) The content of both quotations corresponds fairly precisely to what I have summarized above on motives for the recitation of hta among the Sgaw of my research area. However, as far as the ‘sociology of knowledge’ is concerned, there is an apparent difference. In the stratiﬁed societies of eastern Indonesia the knowledge of traditional poetry associated with the ancestors (which may confer considerable authority) seems mostly to be limited to certain social groups or even to small circles of experts, while the occasions for their recitation are to a high degree subject to formal rules. Among the Karen, the knowledge of hta, though by no means evenly distributed, belongs, in principle, to everybody’s communicative repertoire. It is each individual’s choice to memorize as many hta as he or she can, in order to be able to speak/sing with authority, or manage difﬁcult social situations in a culturally appropriate way.

Functions and formal structure of Sgaw Karen hta The state of research on Karen poetry To my knowledge Karen hta have not yet been the subject of systematic anthropological inquiry. The publications of Western missionaries who worked among Burmese Karen from the middle of the nineteenth until the early twentieth century (most notably Cross, Mason and Marshall) contain a number of verses that seem to be hta. These are, as a rule, only rendered in very free English translations which more or less disguise their original content. Details on their performance or function within Karen society are lacking. The interest of the authors is more to support certain religious or historical theses, or – by quoting ‘sayings of the elders’ – to provide evidence of Karen norms and values thought to be compatible with the Christian doctrine. Several Karen missionaries endeavoured to gather collections of hta in order to preserve what they regarded as a valuable cultural heritage of their people. Some of these collections are available in the form of unpublished manuscripts, e.g. Ko San Lone (1913) or Lay Htoo and Hudspith (1980). However, the former contains only very approximate English ‘translations’ while pursuing similar aims of his Western colleagues. Lay Htoo and Hudspith, on the other hand, provide original texts of Sgaw love and funeral songs, yet virtually without any commentary that could be helpful in the context of this present chapter. Fink (Chapter 5 in this volume) refers to a more recent publication on ‘Karen Songs’ by Maiyot (1995) that seems to contain Karen texts as well as their translation into Thai. Unfortunately,

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this book has not been accessible to me at the time of writing the present chapter. Two ethnomusicological contributions on Pwo Karen of western and northwestern Thailand (Becker 1964; Stern and Stern 1971) provide some hints concerning the formal structure of tae (the Pwo equivalent of the Sgaw term hta) but remain largely silent as far as content and the functional/performative aspects of the verses are concerned. With regard to the latter, the only information I came across in the available literature is a short passage in Fink (1994: 123–124, further elaborated in Chapter 5 in the present volume) on the singing of love hta by adolescents in the course of a particular funeral in a Pwo village. She highlights some of the participants’ ambiguities and anxieties associated with the performance. On the general importance of tay in Pwo society Fink (1994: 124) states: To be known as a great singer, which means always knowing the right verse rather than having a beautiful voice, is a marker of status for both males and females. In an article on ‘Religion and Social Change’ among the Karen which regards ‘knowledge of Karen native song’ as one of ‘four main aspects of Karen ethnic identity’, Maniratanavongsiri (1997) presents a classiﬁcation of hta. Drawing on an unpublished manuscript by Batoo, he discusses ‘elder songs’, ‘funeral songs’, ‘marriage songs’ and ‘general miscellaneous songs’, brieﬂy summarizing the approximate content of each category and indicating some of the (ritual) occasions on which they are sung (pp. 244–247). Valuable as all of this information is, it does not provide us with much detail on the recitation of hta as an aspect of social practice. This chapter, too, cannot ﬁll this gap in any comprehensive way, but rather tries to give a preliminary sketch, concluding with an example to indicate how hta may actually ‘work’ in a concrete social situation. I should like to stress again that what follows is not the result of systematic and detailed study but, as stated at the outset, rather constitutes a by-product of my ﬁeld research in 1982–1983 (which was aimed at quite different topics). In addition my general observations, as far as they are valid, are so only with regard to my research area. They are based on a collection of altogether 136 hta that I gathered during ﬁeld research in 1975/76 and 1982/83. Some functions of hta in traditional Sgaw society Until the 1980s hta were regarded as constituting the core of Karen ‘cultural heritage’. Whenever I discussed with villagers how they could tell pga k’nyau (Karen) from non-pga k’nyau, the ensuing debate usually ended up in a consensus that real Karen were those who had knowledge of hta and knew when and how to use them properly. As quasi-sacred ‘words of the

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ancestors’, hta are supposed to have been handed down through the generations absolutely unchanged. Being the authentic testimony of the founders of good social order, the wording and content of a hta can by deﬁnition never be wrong and not even open to debate. Their intrinsic factual authority, as well as the fact that the recitation of hta – sometimes spoken, but mostly sung – is felt as something beautiful and deeply satisfying, make for the eminent importance and multiple functions of hta in Karen culture. On the one hand, reciting hta ensures that one is moving within the right order sanctioned by tradition; on the other hand, it allows things to be said that could not be said otherwise without the risk of severe disruption of interpersonal relations. This summary thesis will be elaborated on by presenting a brief overview of some important functional types of hta, departing from the contexts in which the hta of my collection were used, while omitting functional types that escaped my attention during ﬁeld research (for instance historical/eschatological hta, used to support statements concerning the remote past or future, or the so-called ‘sayings of the elders’ that serve for the education of young people). It has to be premised that my functional classiﬁcation is artiﬁcial, because many hta, due to their vague and highly metaphorical content, can be used in a variety of different functional contexts. A ﬁrst important category are the New Year hta, sung during the nights of hì sau hkò (‘beginning of the new village’, i.e. renewal of the relations between the human community and their supreme tutelary spirits). On these occasions the village has to present itself as a united community that is ﬁrmly rooted in the traditions inaugurated by the ancestors, which is also the main theme of the New Year hta, expressed in a great number of metaphorical verses (for some typical examples see Mischung 1984: 208). Singing hta during hì sau hkò conveys intense feelings of community. An individual singer starts a verse that comes to his mind, and as soon as the other participants have identiﬁed it (usually after the ﬁrst three or four syllables), everybody joins in, ﬁnishing the hta in a loud chorus. After a short while, one of the fellow villagers takes his turn, and in this way, singing continues until dawn. The succession of singers is not subject to any formal rule, each of the (male!) participants is entitled to begin a hta of his choice whenever he feels like. Occasionally two singers start at the same time; this usually resolves in laughter, whereupon one of the two starts again, while the other waits for his chance. In comparison to the hta sung during the New Year celebrations, funeral hta are quite different in terms of function and associated emotions. They are not spoken (!) for fun and do not express collective feelings, but rather aim at providing knowledge on matters that pertain to the other world, things that cannot be known from other sources. The majority of these verses are designed to instruct the soul of the deceased person on the strange conditions obtaining in the ‘land of the dead’ and on the way to get there (examples in Lay Htoo and Hudspith 1980: 1–2;

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Mischung 1984: 145–146). Through this authoritative teaching, the separation between the worlds of the living and the dead, now endangered by the death of the fellow villager, is re-established. There are no formally recognized experts for hta of this kind in Sgaw society. The task of reciting them at a given funeral will usually be assigned to young men who are instructed and supervised during their performance by elders reputed in this regard. Hta do not only serve for orientation in matters of tradition or for instruction in ‘difﬁcult things’. Their sacrosanct status also makes them an ideal means for expressing feelings, claims, demands or complaints that could not be communicated otherwise. As far as generalizations on ‘typical Karen personality’ are justiﬁable, it could be said that one conspicuous feature is the ever-present anxiety of exposing oneself to others, a reluctance to risk being criticized or even rejected for having displayed personal sentiments, wishes or aggressions too openly. This explains the social importance of some types of hta that convey messages of this kind in a metaphorical way. As a matter of principle, hta can never be subjected to criticism – the speaker cannot be blamed for their content and enjoys the advantage of having expressed himself in a culturally most appropriate form. A welcome side-effect is that the inherent vagueness of the metaphors used in most hta renders the intended statement less unequivocal. A good example of this genre are love hta that were formerly sung to each other by boys and girls when they worked together in the rice ﬁelds during the planting or harvest season. Today love hta can still be heard in the course of funerals when young unmarried people circle around the corpse and sing to each other in antiphony (for a vivid description see Christina Fink’s Chapter 5 in this volume). Verses of this kind frequently form the content of love letters that are written by young men and sent to their sweethearts in distant villages; this way of declaring one’s love is preferred by many out of fear of spontaneous rejection in the case of a faceto-face confession. However, I witnessed several instances where the poetic metaphors of the verses were ambiguous to such an extent that the girls were not sure how to interpret them. When their friends could not help, they usually turned to knowledgeable men of their village who discussed the speciﬁc case and ﬁnally reached a consensus as to the probable meaning of the message encoded in the hta. A further category that is relevant in the present context is what could be called ‘political hta’. They may be used in the course of public discussions to support a position, to admonish or to express disapproval. Depending on the situation and the prevailing atmosphere, these hta are either spoken – woven into ordinary speech – or sung in a chorus after having been started by one of the opponents. The latter alternative is generally preferred because singing the verses is regarded as ‘more beautiful’ and the participation of everybody in the chorus creates a feeling of

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harmony which covers existing conﬂicts. (‘Singing together is fun; you are not angry any more.’) At any point in the discussion, even during a most heated debate, one of the speakers may start singing a hta verse in which he is immediately joined by everyone present, including members of the opposing party. As I said above, a statement expressed through a hta cannot be proven wrong; it can, however, be counterbalanced by the recitation of a verse that formulates a contrary position. To give an example: in a controversy between old and young men about village affairs one of the would-be gerontocrats may start a hta telling of frogs sitting on a large rock; if the rock (i.e. the elders directing village life) is shaken, the frogs (i.e. the young people) cannot dwell on it any more. To counter this, one of the young men may recite a verse containing the metaphor of a big river with many small creeks discharging into it; without those creeks the big river will be dry (i.e. the elder cannot exist without the labour and care of the young). If each of the opposing parties is able to support their position with a series of appropriate hta, the controversy will frequently ﬁnish as a draw, as it becomes obvious that both sides are right in their own way and tradition allows for more than one way of doing things. Some of the hta that are sung customarily during marriage celebrations have quite similar pragmatic functions. Actually ‘marriage hta’ do not form a homogeneous category but rather belong to several different types as far as content and manifest purpose of their recitation are concerned. The following observations focus on the kind of verses that will be presented in this chapter: hta that are sung in turns by ‘hosts’ (inhabitants of the bride’s village) and ‘guests’ (party of the groom). Their recitation in a chorus is regarded as ‘fun’, but at the same time they constitute a medium for expressing controversial expectations and latent emotional tensions on both sides (see next section) without exposing the singers as individuals pursuing personal goals. Here, as in the case of ‘political hta’, a reduction of tensions is achieved in three ways: 1 2

3

Statements made in the form of a hta can, because of their inherent ‘beauty’ and ‘truth’, never be criticized or considered as improper; both sides have a vast repertoire of hta at their disposal that can be used to show that each of their particular positions is legitimate – the conﬂict must not really be fought out but instead becomes ritualized; the fact that all hta are joined in by everyone regardless of his position in the conﬂict affords pleasure and is likely to create a feeling of harmony that covers existing tensions.

Formal characteristics In terms of formal textual structure, nearly all of the 136 hta in my collection conform to a small set of strict rules. In fact their formal structure

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seems to be much more rigid than that of the traditional ‘dyadic’ poetry of eastern Indonesian cultures. A pervasive characteristic of Karen hta is that each line of a stanza is composed of seven syllables (96 per cent of all lines contained in my collection). A second characteristic is reduplication. In Sgaw everyday language redundant formulations are by no means uncommon, and their use seems to increase with the solemnity of a speech (dyadic repetition makes an expression ‘more beautiful’, ‘more complete’). In the hta, being the most solemn and beautiful kind of verbal communication that traditional Karen can imagine, the technique of ‘parallelism’ is applied in an extreme form, repeating whole lines without any substantial change. As a rule, couplets of parallel verses differ in only one or two words of similar semantic or metaphorical content, and occasionally there is no lexical difference at all, the change consisting merely in an inverted order of key words. In most cases parallel lines do not directly succeed one another but are separated by an intervening line that is again repeated after the second line of the ﬁrst couplet. Finally, a third characteristic of Sgaw hta consists in end-rhymes that link pairs of succeeding lines. As far as the length of stanzas is concerned, a quantitative analysis of my collection yielded the following result (A . . . A, B . . . B ⫽ parallel couplets; A, B, C . . . ⫽ lines with different content): 56 hta consisting of 2 lines 58 hta consisting of 4 lines

20 hta consisting of 6 lines 1 hta consisting of 7 lines 1 hta consisting of 8 lines

structure AB structure ABAB structure ABBA structure ABCB structure AABC structure ABCD structure AABBCD structure AABBCDE structure AABBCCDE

(56 cases) (52 cases) (1 case) (1 case) (2 cases) (2 cases) (20 cases) (1 case) (1 case)

The above statistics obscure the fact that the four-line hta of the form ABAB is by far the predominant type. Other than the longer stanzas, most of the 56 two-line hta of my collection are not transcriptions of taperecordings but had been supplied to me by informants who, I am sure, in many cases simply omitted parallel lines because they did not hold any additional content. I estimate that the ‘standard type’ ABAB actually accounts for about 75 per cent of my sample. It consists of four lines where the lines 1/3 and 2/4 are parallel couplets, while the lines 1/2 and 3/4 are linked through end-rhymes. These characteristics obviously apply to ‘important’ hta, i.e. those that are considered as ancestral wisdom. However, it should be noted that the term hta may also be used in a less speciﬁc sense, denoting any kind of poem. In the latter case, formal rules seem to be less strict, although part

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of these ‘informal’ hta may serve functions similar to those discussed above. A probable case in point are the ‘courting songs sung at funerals’ among the Pwo in the Om Koi area (Chapter 5 in this volume) which are, for reasons unknown to me, sung in Sgaw language. Even when we take into account that the pronunciation of the verses is ‘slightly changed’ when sung by Pwo, the examples given by Fink look quite different from the verses that are the subject of this chapter: the lines of the two stanzas consist of only three or four syllables, parallel verses are lacking, and there is only one end-rhyme in each stanza (connecting the second and fourth lines in both cases). Nevertheless these verses still seem to be considered as some kind of hta, as is apparent from the Pwo expression li may tay (Sgaw: lai ma hta, literally, ‘go doing hta’) by which teenagers of Fink’s research area referred to going to a funeral to sing these courting songs. In addition to their different formal structure, these verses are marked off from ‘ancestral’ hta by the fact that they may be created by Pwo adolescents for an upcoming funeral. In contrast, hta that are regarded as the voice of the ancestors must be transmitted from one generation to the next absolutely unchanged.

Situational context of a series of marriage hta recorded in 1982 On the day of his marriage the groom moves into the parental household of his bride where he is supposed to live for at least one or two years. Although intra-village marriages are not uncommon, this means in most cases that the young man has to leave his familiar social environment and build up a new social and economic existence in another village. As a rule the imminent change of social milieu causes considerable emotional stress and even anxiety for Karen men, which may continue for months after the marriage until they ﬁnally manage to integrate themselves into their new environment. On his way to his new home the groom is accompanied by a large entourage of relatives, friends and other fellow villagers who are set to facilitate his transition into a new sphere of life and to celebrate the new formal alliance between both villages. The relationship between these two social groups – the hosts or ‘female’ group on the one side and the guests or ‘male’ group on the other – is a central aspect of Karen marriage ceremonies on which I shall concentrate in the following paragraphs (for more comprehensive descriptions of Karen marriage ceremonies see Hayami 1992: 341–347 (Sgaw), and Chapter 5 in this volume (Pwo)). The largely ritualized interactions between the ‘female’ and ‘male’ sides begin with the arrival of the latter on the ﬁrst day of ceremonies, and last until their journey home on the second day. On the third and fourth day the ‘bride’s people’ make a return visit to the village of the groom, but this event is much less formal and requires less preparation on the part of the hosts.

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The arrival of the groom’s party poses considerable problems not only for the parental household of the bride, but for her whole village: the ‘female side’ is afraid of a collective loss of face, should it not be able to keep up with established standards. The bride’s village now has to put its best foot forward. The community has not only to demonstrate that the groom is welcome but it has to present itself as excellent hosts. Their duty to show solicitude and generosity towards the guests makes them collectively assume the role of ‘elders’ who are responsible for the well-being of the ‘younger ones’. In formal interactions this ascription of roles is likely to be expressed in a speciﬁc terminology of address: the hosts are addressed by the guests as tì (‘uncles’, i.e. elder relatives) while members of the ‘female side’ call their ‘male’ counterparts by the terms hpo dö (‘nieces/nephews’, i.e. younger relatives) or caû (‘male youth’) irrespective of the sex or relative age of the speakers. While the village community of the bride is troubled by apprehensions of failure which would result in a collective loss of reputation, the groom’s entourage enjoys an unusual degree of license: they can taunt their hosts, tease them by making excessive demands and behave in a way that is normally only allowed to children. This may lead to considerable emotional tensions, sometimes even spark latent aggression on both sides. As one elder in my research area put it: ‘When this girl and this boy marry it is like war. War is carried from the village of the groom into the village of the bride’ (Mischung 1984: 271). The basic point in the present context is that both sides have to resort to hta in order to express their relative positions. On the part of the hosts it would be ridiculous to constantly apologize in plain language for (possibly) not being able to meet the high expectations of the visitors. The only legitimate way to counter an anticipated critique is to recite verses that, using a variety of metaphors, present the own side as completely destitute and incapable of catering adequately for such a great number of guests. The message of these hta suggests that the lack of provisions is a normal condition in Karen villages since the time of the ancestors so that the hosts should not be blamed for it. The guests counter these assertions by singing verses that imply demands which could not be raised in ordinary speech without exposing the speaker to the risk of being regarded as excessively greedy. As explained above, singing hta together results in general relaxation and serves to smooth an existing confrontation. Besides, in the present case ‘ﬁghting with hta’ can also be seen as a kind of contest in which each side tries to outwit the other through the most skilful choice of verses pertinent to the actual situation. Let me now turn to the concrete events in March 1982. The marriage celebrated on the 6th and 7th of that month in the village of Mû Kä Klô involved Naù Ceî Wau, a daughter of Saù Nu, and Maù Gwa, a young man from the neighbouring village of Tà Fà. The preparations for the feast had kept the village community busy for many days if not weeks. In the house

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of Saù Nu as in most other households of Mû Kä Klô large quantities of rice liquor had been distilled; the unmarried girls of the village had produced piles of cigars that on this particular occasion had to be carefully formed with red ornamental threads wound around them; everywhere the stocks of betel had been replenished and colourful necklaces stored up as presents for the guests, while large pots with rice and curries were waiting for consumption. On the 6 March around noon Saù Nu slaughters a young water buffalo and several pigs for the reception of the guests. A part of the meat is distributed to other households of the village who will also act as hosts today and tomorrow. Maù Gwa and his retinue have announced their arrival for the early afternoon but, as usual, there is some delay; in the meantime men of Mû Kä Klô have started to drink with guests from other villages of the territory. Finally the crowd from Tà Fà, numbering ﬁfty-three and including virtually its whole adult and adolescent population, approaches the village around 5.30 pm. The procession is accompanied by the sound of drums and gongs and led by Maù Gwa who, completely drunk and hardly able to walk, is supported by two friends. His condition is considered entirely normal on this occasion, because everybody feels that a groom cannot bear taking leave from his native village in a sober state. All members of the groom’s procession with the exception of Maù Gwa himself (who is not allowed to enter his new home before midnight) climb the ladder to Saù Nu’s veranda where they are received with splashes of water from bamboo tubes. The younger men from Tà Fà hang up their carrying bags on the veranda where they will later be ﬁlled with cigars and necklaces by girls of Mû Kä Klô. After a ﬁrst lavish welcoming meal, rice liquor is poured out to everyone. Soon all conversation is drowned by choruses singing hta aü moô (literally: ‘songs [for] eating [with] guests’). Later in the evening the majority of the visitors disperse to other households of the village to continue drinking and singing hta. The verses presented here were recorded at one of these peripheral settings. With a single exception (see below) they form a sequence that is typical of the ‘social’ sub-genre of marriage songs in my research area. The ﬁrst three stanzas are meant to characterize the situation in general terms. They indicate the apprehensions of the hosts (hta 1) and guests (hta 2) about not being able to meet the expectations of the respective other side – including, in the latter case, concerns at losing face because of a less than adequate command of hta aü moô ! Hta 3 expresses the joy felt by the hosts at the reunion of both villages. Signiﬁcantly, the terms of address preceding the hta (sung to the same tune) are still neutral at this stage (‘friends’, ‘brothers and sisters’). Subsequently, as the content of the verses becomes more speciﬁc, so do the terms of address (‘elder relatives’, ‘younger relatives’/‘boys’). Hta 4–13 are varieties of two basic oppositional themes: the hosts repeat, in different metaphorical formulations, their assertion that they are lacking everything that would be necessary to

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adequately cater for their guests (in obvious contradiction to the facts, because large quantities of liquor, tobacco and betel are constantly being offered to them). To this the visitors object, saying that the hosts are exaggerating their poverty (hta 5, 7). The supplies of luxuries that exist beyond doubt should be given to them without further delay (hta 9, 11). Hta 14 and the following lines, sung to the same tune, constitute a break with the preceding songs. Until this point the poetical dispute has been playful. Now the emotions of some very drunken guests become heated, and hta 14 contains an unusually speciﬁc demand: the ornamented cigars that have been prepared for the occasion should at once be distributed by the girls of the household (or: of the village). This urgent request is immediately followed by a serious faux pas by members of the ‘male side’. They interrupt the hosts who, after an appeasing address (‘slowly, slowly, you hasty boys’), are just about to start a new stanza. The two subsequent lines sung by the guests (‘We are waiting . . .’) imply an insult to the local girls and are not a hta in the traditional sense – according to informants who witnessed the scene, ‘improprieties of this kind can never be expressed through a hta’. However, the hosts, fearing that the situation might get out of control, continue with two stanzas that are intended to calm tempers (hta 15, 17): they concede that the local girls are indeed not so very skilful and not worth making much fuss of them. After having politely objected that the village girls’ reputation is not actually that bad (hta 16), the guests calm down and the following songs revert to the usual themes – laments of the ‘female side’ concerning the lack of supplies (hta 19, 21), assertions to the contrary by the ‘males’, followed by requests for generous entertainment (hta 18, 20). The latent conﬂict which had initially been felt by both parties is ritualized and gradually disappears as the singing continues. In the course of the night the songs change to other themes: the nature of the life-long bond created by marriage, the respective duties of husband and wife, the importance of the parents’ loving care for their children, the love of the future in-laws towards each other, the happiness to celebrate together and so on. These hta are also sung by both parties in antiphony, but they are no longer directed against each other but rather complement one another.

Transcription and translation Preliminary remarks The rendering of the Karen original text follows the conventions for the transcription of the Sgaw language as laid down by the Catholic Mission in Chom Thong and Mae Pon (for typographical reasons the high pitch is marked by the symbol ‘^’). In order to distinguish them from phrases considered as ‘ordinary language’ (which were nevertheless sung to the same

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tune as the hta), hta verses are printed in italics. Insertions of words that were not sung, but deemed necessary for the ‘correct’ rendering of a stanza by my informants, are put in square brackets, while round brackets are used to mark redundancies that were sung, but do not belong to the traditional version of a hta. The symbols [f ] and [m] indicate that the following lines were sung by the ‘female’ and ‘male’ sides, respectively. The translation of the verses into an adequate poetic language was clearly beyond my capacities. Therefore I am grateful to Mr von Brandenstein, a native speaker of English and expert in English poetry, who undertook this onerous task with great skill (so at least is my impression). In most cases the exigencies of English poetic language precluded an exact translation, and parallel lines usually look more different in the English version than they actually are in the Karen text. However, I took great care to ensure that the original meaning of the verses is conveyed as closely as possible. Transcription [f ]

seì eh: 1 p’goo maù hkwa hai ö pga (hai ö pga) p’maî hsgâ lau dä p’sâ p’goo maù hkwa hai ö caû (hai ö caû) p’maî hsgâ lau dä sâ lau [m] nä lai pù yai waì seì seì eh: 2 c’cî c’ma di pga saû (pga saû) ma t’htì blä t’htì naû c’cî c’ma di saû na (saû na) ma t’htì naû t’htì blä [f ] nä lai pù yai waì seì seì eh: 3 ö t’ga qau ö t’sei (t’sei) ö s’kâ hti wà yà yei ö t’ga qau ö t’nyau (t’nyau) ö s’kâ hti wà yà hkau mau cî na pù yai waì yai seì seì eh – seì eh: 4 hpau mò â dê lei lau plaû (lau plaû) dî seì lei bo wà lei yau hpau mò â dê lei lau ho (lau ho) dî seì lei bo wà lei bo [m] tì lê yai â yù eh: 5 î lau n’sâ yaü htò troo (htò troo) î lau eï caû â gaù poo î lau n’sâ yaü htò trâ (htò trâ) î lau eï caû â gaù sâ [f ] 6 t’pgai htaù lê naù ga oh (ga oh) naù ga oh sro là hklù bo

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[m]

[f ]

[m]

[f ]

[m]

[f ]

[m]

[f ]

[m] [f ]

[m]

Roland Mischung t’pgai htaù lê naù ga i (ga i) naù ga oh sro là hklù hki tì lê yai â yù eh – yù eh: 7 yä s’tò hplei yò â nwi (â nwi) naù sì nai hkâ yò â mi yä s’tò hplei yò â sâ (â sâ) naù sì nai hkâ yò mi mâ 8 yò t’yò n’kwà kwà se (kwà se) cû kì lù gwa t’ö le yò t’yò n’kwà kwà i (kwà i) cû kì lù gwa t’ö dî 9 hsau tà boö pgai hpaî pgai daû (pgai daû) n’k’boö soô laì t’hkau hsau tà boö pgai hpaî pgai mâ (pgai mâ) n’k’boö soô laì t’pa mau cî na hpo dö â mû â yù eh – yù eh: 10 meì taî naù cû laì hkaù htau (hkaù htau) ö lê seì hki naù klau lau meì taî naù cû laì hkaù râ (hkaù râ) ö lê seì hki naù klau mâ 11 n’mò lê ple boö cau sau (cau sau) lau lê na ma boö kwà caû n’mò lê ple boö sau hka (sau hka) lau lê na boö kei kwà ya 12 meì taî naù â tà boö pgai (boö pgai) soô mò boö sâ qò lau cai meì taî naù â tà boö htau (boö htau) qò lau cai soô mò boö au 13 meì taî naù â tà boö a (boö a) pgai i naù dau lê â hkwa tì lê yai â yù eh – yù eh: 14 coò s’loô dî bu â de (â de) ma yù caû so hplaì cû ne na lai hpo dö lê yai â yù eh – yù eh: k’baî k’baî oh caû eh – caû eh: [——————] s’mai naù k’yâ k’yâ (k’yâ) naù mî t’kê naù k’hsga mau cî na hpo dö â mû â yù eh – yù eh: 15 pgei bä naù â mi t’gei (t’gei) naù t’mi sî t’mi mei pgei bä naù â mi t’gei auh . . . [naù t’mi sî dö mei htau] 16 naù lê â mi pò proô proô pò cô hkle sâ htaù cô poo

When it is better to sing than to speak naù lê â mi htaù naù eh pò cô poo sâ htaù cô hkle [f ] 17 naù lê â mi ö qau lau (qau lau) mi lê mò kaû lê pà kaû naù lê â mi ö qau mâ (qau mâ) mi lê mò kaû lê pà câ [m] 18 s’ei â hpi pgà ö dî (ö dî) naù wai tà koô nyà dö hsî s’ei â hpi pgà ö htau (ö htau) naù wai tà koô nyà caî lau [f ] 19 s’ei â hpi pgà lau qai (lau qai) koô nyà koô qô ceì prâ lai s’ei â hpi pgà lau hsgau (lau hsgau) koô nyà koô qô ceì prâ lau [m] 20 pga k’yaì â lai hpaû caû hki (caû hki) kwà eî ya de dö de prî pga k’yaì â lai qû de ya (de ya) kwà eî ya kaû laì â ga [f ] na lai hpo dö â mû â yù eh – yù eh: 21 [tà] t’ö lê naù â cû (â cû) pù tu waì tu naù sâ û Translation [f ]

Friends: 1 Our friends are coming to be with us, embarrassed we are thus; Our friends are coming to be with us as boys, embarrassed we are, made coy. [m] Brothers and sisters: 2 How others act and what they say, I cannot contrive today; To proceed and speak like you, I manage not this time to do. [f ] Brothers and sisters: 3 One cannot live alone, on both banks of the river so; Tis not light living lone as such, tween both banks of a river as much. We are telling you brothers and sisters: 4 The maiden’s mother’s house is empty, like a tree naked, unplenty; The maiden’s mother’s house is exposed, like a tree naked, I suppose. [m] Elder relatives for whom we feel such affection:

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5 Thy exhibits thouself inconspicuously, thee bird of troo, to us, that is all you show; Thy presents thouself inconspicuously, thee bird of trâ, for us, that is all so far. [f ] 6 The maiden’s people fare sparsely, as là hklù stalks, appear beautifully; The maiden’s people possess little, as là hklù tips, appear beautiful. [m] Elder relatives for whom we feel such affection: 7 The shrunk quilt’s tassels have frayed, such the maid Sì Nai her name herself doth degrade; Shrink and fray the quilt’s tassels may, such the maid Sì Nai her name herself doth shame. [f ] 8 See if they have shrunken, já or ná, the white threads for the kì cû, spent are they; See if they have shrunken, low or no, there are no more for the kì cû, you must know. [m] 9 Baskets full of gifts prepared, with whom shall they be shared; Baskets full of gifts already made, but where shall they be laid. [f ] We’re telling you younger relatives that bring us joy, for whom we feel such affection: 10 Should the maid have limbs that long, from the tree tops she would prongue; Should the maid have limbs that large, from the tree tops she would forage. [m] 11 Your mother has donated to the monks before, so now give to the boys, tis up to you, for sure; Generous your mother has been, to the boys, in turn, should be seen. [f ] 12 If only the maid had abundant gifts, she would offer them to the Lau Cai stupa swift; If the maid would be copious, to the Lau Cai stupa she would give generous. 13 Should she have so many gifts discovered, she would take the man as her beloved. [m] Elder relatives for whom we feel such affection: 14 Run to a point, like a ripe rice blade’s stand, induces yearning, like a boy with air in hand. [f ] Younger relatives for whom we feel such affection: Slowly, slowly, you hasty boys: [Another ‘female’ hta should have followed at this point but the opposition interrupts:]

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[m] We are waiting for the maid to consider us, should the maid be wise, then she would quickly die. [f ] We’re telling you younger relatives that bring us joy, for whom we feel such affection: 15 The maiden’s name do not pronounce, no liquor, no rice, she cannot make an ounce; Don’t utter the maiden’s name aloud, . . . [last line was not sung]. [m] 16 Maiden whose name be famous, famous within and without this common house; Maiden whose name be famous, famous within and without this common house. [f ] 17 Maiden whose name be normal, name by which her parents call her; Maiden whose name be normal, name by which her parents call her. [m] 18 All ginger roots, they still remain, better than shown be the maiden’s name; All ginger roots, they still remain, better than shown be the maiden’s name. [f ] 19 Depleted are the roots of ginger, their condition is getting slimmer; Depleted are the roots of ginger, their condition is getting slimmer. [m] 20 All that came at the boy’s call, care for these, for big or small; The boys and all their company, must be cared for properly. [f ] Younger relatives that bring us joy, for whom we feel such affection: 21 The maiden’s hands hold nothing, she is shamed by them arriving. Commentary to speciﬁc formulations and metaphors 2 ‘How others act and what they say’ refers to the assumed expectations on the part of the hosts concerning adequate behaviour and knowledge of hta. 3 This stanza conveys a double meaning. It expresses 1) the joy at the meeting of the two village communities; 2) the necessity of marital union between husband and wife. 5 troo/trâ: two small and inconspicuous species of birds. 6 là hklù: a forest plant with very beautiful leaves that are nevertheless completely worthless to the Karen. 7 Quilt’s tassels: The tassels are considered as the most beautiful component of a traditional Karen blanket. Sì Nai is a woman’s name that is

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8

10 12 13 14

16 17 18

Roland Mischung regarded as particularly melodious. Here both expressions are metaphors for the generosity and possession of large supplies attributed to the hosts (which the latter, however, have just denied). kì cû (‘tying the wrists’), which is performed to heal sickness and secure well-being, is the most frequent rite of traditional Karen religion. It involves the use of white cotton threads which therefore constitute one of the most essential possessions of any ‘animist’ Karen household. ‘Long limbs’: metaphorical expression denoting the capacity of the hosts (‘girl’) to cater for the visitors. Lau Cai: Sgaw name of a well-known stupa in Burma, in the present context used as a metaphor for the visitors. ‘Take the man as her beloved’ implies a generous supply with gifts. ‘Run to a point, like a ripe rice blade’s stand’ alludes to the slim and beautiful shape of the cigars which have been specially produced for this occasion. ‘Common house’ signiﬁes the village of the bride. ‘Maid whose name be normal’ contends that the local girls have no particular reputation. ‘Ginger roots’: metaphor for the supplies that the hosts are supposed to have in store for the guests.

Conclusion In this chapter I have tried to show the importance of a certain type of oral tradition for the internal constitution and indeed for the ‘working’ of Karen village society. At the same time it could be demonstrated that the hta of the Karen are not an isolated cultural phenomenon in the region, but rather a variant of a cultural element that is widespread in large parts of Southeast Asia. I wish to stress that the ethnographic material upon which this article is based is highly fragmentary, and so the interpretations offered can be nothing but tentative. Nevertheless I hope that I have aroused sufﬁcient interest in some readers to stimulate systematic anthropological ﬁeld research on the topic, which would ﬁll an important gap in our knowledge of social life in Karen villages. In proposing this, a cautionary remark seems to be appropriate. In my research area the knowledge of hta has greatly diminished since the 1980s, at least among the younger generation and especially among Christian converts. The same is probably true of many other Karen settlements. For instance, Maniratanavongsiri (1997: 248–250) points out a considerable difference in the ‘knowledge of Karen native songs’ between the (neighbouring?) Sgaw villages of Hse Htà (Catholic) and Mu Tei Klo (‘animist’). In the Karen villages of the Inthanon massif Christians still form a minority, and hta are used as before, for New Year celebrations, marriage ceremonies or funerals. On other occasions, however, the recitation of

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traditional verses is gradually going out of use even among practitioners of ‘animistic’ rites. The diminishing importance of canonical ‘ancestral wisdom’ may be deplored by many, but on the other hand this opens up additional research questions: how is the conﬁrmation and reinforcement of a distinct Karen lifestyle achieved under these conditions? In which sectors of social and ceremonial life is the recitation of hta still prevalent and/or considered important (and, if so, by whom)? By what alternative or complementary means are social tensions and conﬂicts managed nowadays? And, ﬁnally, what are the implications for the construction of a collective identity as ‘Karen’, in which the knowledge of hta played such a central role until recently?

Part III

Social and economic adaptation to government development policies

Introduction to Part III Claudio O. Delang

As a result of land classiﬁcation under Thai forest policy, most Karen live in forest reserves, where they are neither allowed to clear forest for farming, nor to extract timber and other forest products. This has caused grave economic hardships to the population, in terms of the reduced availability of farmland and of timber and non-timber products required for survival. The two chapters of this section address the way the Karen adapt their economy to government intervention and restriction in land use. The ﬁrst chapter, by Claudio Delang, deals with the cultural background behind the economic choices of the Karen. The chapter describes the outlook of the Karen, the way they view the world outside their village cluster and the opportunities available there, as well as the inﬂuence individuals can have on the economic choices of others. The chapter argues that the Karen are reluctant to enter the market economy because of their ‘indigeny’ and ‘many-strandedness’, as well as their ethic of sufﬁciency. Indigeny induces the Karen to be relatively risk-averse towards what comes from outside the village cluster, and prompts them to reject cash crops if traders do not sell the inputs on credit and promise to come and buy the harvest. Many-strandedness gives power to those villagers, whose ability to remain subsistence farmers is compromised by the adoption of cash crops, to put pressures on others not to grow them. The chapter argues that these values prompt the Karen to earn the little cash they need in ways that are compatible with the subsistence economy. Two areas are compared to better understand how this outlook changes with different levels of isolation and land scarcity, and how this in turn affects their economic choices. The second chapter, by Oliver Puginier, addresses the same issue of the limited control of the Karen over the natural resources they need to survive, but does so from a different angle, considering the way this control can be increased by empowering them. A discussion is made of the contradictory policies of different government departments, and of the difﬁculties the Karen are faced with when juggling between these policies. The chapter then describes the participatory land use planning approach employed by the Thai-German Highland Development

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Programme (TG-HDP) in Mae Hong Son Province, and elaborates possibilities to integrate it into a simpliﬁed Geographic Information System (GIS). The aim is to improve land use planning under the supervision of the Tambon Administrative Organizations (TAO), whose mandate includes the management of local natural resources. The approach described in the chapter is the development of maps which would be understandable by all stakeholders, using GIS technology. This would solve the problem of the lack of a common base map for the assessment and management of natural resources such as forests, water sources, protected areas, agricultural land and settlements. Oliver Puginier concludes by arguing that although this approach can help solve problems of land use, it can also have ‘undesired consequences for farmers, including land conﬁscation’. However, the greatest obstacle to efﬁcient participatory land use planning in Thailand is still the insufﬁcient political will to truly devolve central control over resources and to render TAOs functioning planning platforms, as key agencies like the Department of Land Development and the Royal Forest Department are not represented there. Both chapters stress the need to involve the subjects of development into the development process, by giving them the opportunity to interpret the social, economic and physical landscapes through their own cultural lenses.

8

Social and economic adaptations to a changing landscape Realities, opportunities and constraints Claudio O. Delang

Introduction The signing of the Bowring Treaty in 1855 forced Siam to open itself to world trade, and large areas of the Chao Phraya basin were planted with rice. The colonization of the periphery was partly motivated by the fear of invasion by the colonial powers that had occupied the neighbouring countries: Britain in Burma (Myanmar), and France in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Until the 1930s it was still said that the problem was that of the peripheral areas being under-populated, thus prone to invasion (Zimmerman 1931, cited in Hirsch 1987b), with 70 per cent of the country covered by forests (Feeny 1988). The colonization of the periphery progressed at a staggering speed. Whilst in 1850 less than 960,000 hectares (ha) were planted with rice, in 1905 there were over 1.44 million ha, and in 1950 about 5.6 million ha. The expansion of rice land came at the expense of forests (Figure 8.1). 40,000

8,000

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2,000 0

Forest area (’000 ha)

Area farmed with rice (’000 ha)

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19 0 19 5 1 19 0 1 19 5 2 19 0 2 19 5 3 19 0 3 19 5 4 19 0 4 19 5 5 19 0 5 19 5 6 19 0 6 19 5 7 19 0 7 19 5 8 19 0 8 19 5 90

0

Year area of rice

forest area (right axis)

Figure 8.1 Rice land v. forest area in Thailand. Sources: Rice land from Mitchell (1998: Table C1), forest cover from Hirsh (1987: Table 3.1).

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Most of this increase in rice production was for export rather than the domestic market. Between 1855 and 1934 the Thai population doubled from 6 to 12 million, but rice exports multiplied by 28 times (Mitchell 1998, Table C17; Ingram 1971, 37–40). However, only a quarter of Siam was suitable for agriculture (Anderson 1993, 43), and the result was that progressively less fertile land was opened to rice farming. What further accelerated the colonization of the periphery was the lack of investment in increased productivity. The limited funds that were available were invested in a rail network to allow further colonization of the periphery, rather than, for example, irrigating the Central Plains (Hirsch 1990). This pattern of colonization in the lowlands continued until World War II, when it was temporarily interrupted because of the disruption in world trade that resulted from the war. The end of the war brought a new political-economic environment. Increased trade in the area of inﬂuence of the United States and the competition of the two superpowers for politicoideological hegemony had profound effects on the Thai highlands. While before the war deforestation was largely conﬁned to the lowlands and undertaken by landless farmers, after the war many other groups joined in, this time in the highlands, but still with the encouragement of the government (see Delang 2002a). Until the 1950s, logging companies concentrated on high-value timber (such as teak), leaving the majority of other trees standing, and the forest area diminished slowly. From the 1950s demand increased for all kinds of wood, and logging expanded at a rapid rate. For example, from 1973 to 1978, the forests in northern Thailand alone were cut down at a rate of 345,600 ha/year (Phongpaichit and Baker 1996). Moreover, after the 1950s the industrial expansion in Thailand and the West required an increasing amount of minerals, and several mines opened in the northern Thai highlands. At the same time, agribusinesses became involved in the production of highland temperate cash crops, many of which were for export. The area in the north that was farmed with maize and soya beans alone increased from 12,920 hectares in 1950–1952 to 1,192,160 hectares in 1989–1990 (Phongpaichit and Baker 1996: 54). Finally, in the 1970s the highlands gave refuge to opponents of the Thai military dictatorship, and the government had an interest in promoting the settlement of the area by lowland farmers, who, because of population pressures, could no longer ﬁnd land to clear and farm. This settlement was accompanied by the construction of roads, which facilitated the colonization of increasingly isolated areas. The road network increased from approximately 5,000 km in 1950 to almost 30,000 km in 1980 (Uhlig and Riethmuller 1984: 126). Many of these land uses were in direct competition with those of the highland ethnic minorities, and eventually resulted in conﬂicts between lowlanders and highlanders. In the attempt to reduce these conﬂicts, to incorporate the periphery into the national economy and to raise the

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incomes of the people living in the highlands, the government pursued a number of policies, of which three are relevant here: 1 2 3

the outlawing of swiddening, the outlawing of opium, and the introduction of cash crops for the lowland Thai market.

The introduction of cash crops was expected to solve all problems at once. Cash crops would allow people to earn higher incomes, thus compensating for the loss of land caused by the outlawing of swiddening. They would also ease the abandonment of opium production, as the farmers now had crops that could (at least potentially) give them comparably high incomes. Finally, cash crops would engage farmers in the national economy, thus fostering national unity in the farthest provinces. In spite of the effort and money that were invested in promoting cash crops and their alleged economic advantages for the ethnic minority groups, not all groups have adopted them with the same enthusiasm. Some groups have almost completely abandoned the production of rice and other subsistence crops and enthusiastically entered the market economy, but other groups continue to produce predominantly subsistence crops. This is the case of the Karen, whose economy in most highland villages is still subsistence-oriented. Subsistence-orientation and cash-orientation It is important ﬁrst to discuss the differences between subsistence-oriented and cash-oriented economies. By ‘subsistence orientation’ I mean an economy that is based on the production of food for consumption and the extraction of most other necessities from the natural environment. Although subsistence orientation does not mean that no goods are bought in the market, these goods form a relatively small part of the people’s total consumption. In contrast, a cash-oriented economy is one in which people sell most of the crops that they grow, using the income earned to purchase food and other necessities. Although the threshold between a subsistence orientation and a cash orientation is not clear-cut, the distinction is useful for the present discussion, particularly in terms of the reliance of the Karen on the natural environment. Subsistence-oriented farmers must earn the small amount of cash that they require from time to time in ways that are compatible with their subsistence economy. Earning cash must not compromise their ability to grow subsistence crops and to use the natural environment to obtain what they do not produce (such as timber to build houses and food to supplement their crops). Cash-oriented farmers can be less vigilant, and can afford to degrade the environment if they can earn sufﬁcient cash to buy in the market what the environment can no longer provide.

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Subsistence-oriented and cash-oriented economies tend to be incompatible because when cash crops become more common in a speciﬁc area, the costs involved in remaining subsistence-oriented increase for everyone in the community, including those people who wish to remain subsistence-oriented. Three reasons for this increase in costs can be noted here. First, cash crops require pesticides and fertilizers, which pollute the rivers and cause the death of ﬁsh and other water creatures. Subsistence farmers who supplement their food intake with ﬁsh are then faced with increasing scarcities and are forced to buy ﬁsh in the market. This increases their need for cash and forces them to make a shift to a more cash-oriented economy. Second, the growing of cash crops tends to lead to greater deforestation. Whereas subsistence crops are often not sold, which leads subsistence-oriented farmers to grow only as much as they need to feed their households, cash-crop farmers try to increase their incomes by farming as much as possible. Thus, cash-crop farmers tend to clear larger ﬁelds than do subsistence farmers, and larger than what they can farm themselves because they can pay others to carry out the work. As subsistence farmers need large tracts of forest to gather food to supplement their rice diet, increased deforestation would compromise their ability to remain subsistence-oriented. Their need to buy in the market what they can no longer extract from the forest will eventually increase their need for cash and force them, too, to make the transition to a cash-oriented economy. Third, cash crops discourage the raising of cattle, which is a source of income that, in northern Thailand, is compatible with a subsistenceoriented economy. During the rainy season, cattle can be left roaming in the forest, and if the forest is sufﬁciently large, the owners only need to check intermittently that their cattle are safe, in good health and have not entered other people’s ﬁelds. After the rice harvest, the cattle are left on the paddies, where their dung is a valued fertilizer for the following season. Thus, cattle do not compete for the land or other resources of a subsistence rice economy. However, if there is a shift towards cash crops, the workload of the cattle owners tends to increase. First, as just mentioned, because cash crops tend to take up more land, they reduce the amount of forest that is available to cattle. This forces the farmer to go more frequently to the forest to look after his cattle. Second, if there is sufﬁcient water, cash crops are also grown during the dry season and the cattle can no longer be left roaming in the paddies. The cattle might then be left near the house, and food fetched daily from the forest. However, this increases the workload of the cattle owners, while the proﬁts that can be derived from the cattle remain constant, making it more proﬁtable to grow cash crops. These three points show some simple trade-offs between subsistence orientation and cash orientation. It is important to note that when some individuals in a community make a shift to growing cash crops, the others

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must follow suit, or failing this, put up with ever increasing shortages. This chapter will argue that the Karen attempt to remain subsistence-oriented and are able to do so because of the particular social relations present in Karen society. The chapter proceeds as follows. The next section introduces the theoretical framework. Using examples from the literature and my ﬁeldwork, I discuss how the outlook of the members of a society can affect the way in which they interpret and adapt to indigenous or exogenous changes. I then illustrate how this has inﬂuenced the economic choices of the Karen. I will argue that individuals have sufﬁcient inﬂuence on the behaviour and choices of others, so that those who want to remain subsistence-oriented are able to prevent those who want to become cash-oriented from making this transition. Two neighbouring areas will be compared to allow the extrapolation of the results to many other Karen villages in the highlands of northern Thailand. The data used in this chapter come from ﬁeldwork that I carried out in sub-district (Tambon) Bo Kaeo from April 1999 to January 2000 (Delang 2002b). The Tambon is made up of two distinct areas, with different penetrations of the market economy: the Mae Kha Pu village cluster and what I will call, for lack of a better term, ‘lowland’ Bo Kaeo. The Mae Kha Pu village cluster is made up of four villages, Mae Kha Pu Luang, Mae Kha Pu Nai, Mae Kha Pu Nua and Mae Kha Pu Peng, which together are inhabited by approximately 164 households (800 individuals). There are only a few ethnic Thai who have married in the village cluster and have completely assimilated with the Karen population. Lowland Bo Kaeo is made up of 7 registered villages, one of which is Hmong, two predominantly Thai and four almost exclusively Karen. Altogether the population is approximately 877 households (4,000 individuals), 50 per cent of which are Karen, 25 per cent Hmong and 25 per cent Thai. There is a paved road from the sub-district capital (the village of Bo Kaeo) to the district capital of Samoeng (40 km or 1 hour away), and from there to the provincial capital of Chiang Mai (another 40 km away). Within lowland Bo Kaeo the road network is relatively good, most roads being paved. However, the village cluster of Mae Kha Pu is more isolated by the relatively poor state of the only road to the outside world – the dirt road that leads to the Tambon capital. During the dry season the Tambon capital is reachable in approximately 20 minutes by motorcycle or car, or almost 1 hour by foot, while during the rainy season the road trip is much more difﬁcult. During the initial months of my ﬁeldwork I submitted a questionnaire to 64 households in Mae Kha Pu and 132 households of Bo Kaeo. Some of the data from that survey are used here to quantitatively support my conclusions about the effects of indigeny and multi-strandedness on the choices of the population. Before describing the economy in the two areas, and the cultural

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background of the choices made by the Karen, I introduce the theoretical framework that I will use to interpret my ﬁeldwork observations.

Indigeny and exogeny, multi- and single-strandedness The argument presented in this chapter is related to a long-running discussion in the social sciences regarding a basic distinction between two kinds of societies. On the one hand, there are ‘traditional’ (Parsons 1951), ‘gemeinschaftliche’ (Tönnies 1955), or ‘collectivist’ (Hofstede 1980) societies. On the other hand there are ‘modern’ (Parsons 1951), ‘gesellschaftliche’ (Tönnies 1955), or ‘individualistic’ (Hofstede 1980) societies. In a discourse that tends to present a romantic view of the past, the former are often considered to be pre-capitalist societies, which are purportedly free from the problems, insecurities and alienation of the individual in modern capitalist societies. Capitalism, with its greater division of labour, is thought to have caused a change in the way people interact with one another, in the way they rationalize what they experience, and in the way they relate to the environment. Table 8.1 lists some of the scholars who have written about this dichotomy, and the terms that they have used to describe these two societies. It should be emphasized that these deﬁnitions are in no way synonyms, but only deal with similar concepts. The dichotomies listed in Table 8.1 are to a large extent theoretical, and should be used, as is done in this chapter, as a tool to analyse and understand what is observed rather than to make sweeping generalizations. All societies are somewhere in between the two extremes, and elements of both characteristics can exist side by side – in different domains – as well as amongst different individuals, as not all individuals in a society have the same outlook, some being more ‘folk’ while others more ‘urban’ (to use the deﬁnition of Wirth 1993 [1938]). Moreover, the differences in this polarity are to a great extent graded, and when societies change, what changes is the balance between, for example, ‘folk’ and ‘urban’. In other words, from being more ‘folk’ than ‘urban’, a society may become more ‘urban’, but this does not mean that it initially had none of the characteristics that now make it ‘urban’ or that it subsequently loses all the characteristics that made it a ‘folk’ society. In spite of these difﬁculties, the dichotomy is still useful as a means of developing a theoretical discussion for analysis. The scholars listed in Table 8.1 usually have different emphases, but they all consider one or more of three different facets of human interactions: ﬁrst, the psychological relationship between individuals and places; second, the relationship between individuals; and third, the understanding or perception of one’s activities. In this chapter, I use the ﬁrst two of these three to shed light on the choices that the Karen have made when faced with increasing population pressures and attempts to introduce cash

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Table 8.1 Major works exploring the dichotomy between the theoretical extreme of societies Scholar

Deﬁnitions

Source

Karl Marx

‘species-being’ and ‘alienation’ ‘Gemeinschaft’ (community) and ‘Gesellschaft’ (society) ‘organic’ and ‘mechanical’ solidarity ‘status’ and ‘contract’ ‘formal’ and ‘substantive’ rationality ‘participatory’ and ‘discursive’ mentalities evolution of the various notions of the self and the person ‘folk’ and ‘urban’ ‘familistic’ and ‘contractual’ relationships ‘multiplex’ and ‘simple’ social relations ‘communion’ and ‘agency’ ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ ‘undifferentiated’ and ‘differentiated’ ‘collectivism’ and ‘individualism’ ‘many-stranded’ and ‘single-stranded’ social relations ‘community’ and ‘society’ (same terms as those used by Tönnies) ‘interdependent’ and ‘independent’ view ‘indigeny’ and ‘exogeny’

(1986 [1844]: 35–47)*

Ferdinand Tönnies Emile Durkheim Henry Sumner Maine Max Weber Lucien Lévy-Bruhl Marcel Mauss Louis Wirth Pitirim A. Sorokin Meyer Fortes David Bakan Talcott Parsons Robert Neelly Bellah Geert H. Hofstede Ernest Gellner John A. Agnew H. Markus and S. Kitayama Geoffrey Benjamin

(1955 [1887])*§† (1902: Ch. 2 and 3)* (1885: 172–174)* (1958 [1918])* (1975 [1938])* (1938)* (1993 [1938])‡ (1948)† (1962)* (1966)† (1951)‡ (1969)* (1980, 1991) (1988) (1989) (1991)† (1999)

Sources: *Benjamin 1999; §Hofstede 1991; †Kim 1994; ‡Agnew 1989.

crops. Of all the terminologies and emphases used, I retain that of indigeny versus exogeny (Benjamin 1999), and of many-strandedness versus single-strandedness (Gellner 1988). Whilst it is not always easy to separate the components of Karen social organization into those that are responsible for their particular relationship with the locale and those that are responsible for their relationships with fellow villagers, it is useful to attempt to do so to understand the cultural background behind their subsistence orientation.

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The relationship between people and places: indigeny and exogeny The importance of the place-to-people nexus in the way that the psychology of individuals is formed – along the lines of the dichotomies shown in Table 8.1 – was dealt with by Benjamin (1999) in a wide ranging discussion. Benjamin considered the time that a population has inhabited an area as the determining factor in the psychological relationship it has with its social and physical environments. He divided populations into the theoretical extremes of indigenous and exogenous, which relate to the time one or one’s ancestors have settled in one particular area. The words indigeny and exogeny indicate a psychological attribute of the people, the individual’s ‘taken-for-granted’ world and their conceptualization of space and place, rather than their overt discourse, or the historical condition or geographical origin of a population. Thus, it does not refer to ‘tribal’, ‘aboriginal’ or ‘native’, but to the level of attachment of a population to a particular place. Indigenous people are those who exhibit a strong sense of attachment, psychological or emotional, to the place that they inhabit. These people have been living in one particular place for several generations and have developed a close relationship with that place. They ‘don’t see themselves as possessing autonomous selves, separate from the rest of existence; rather, they see themselves as part of the very place in which they live, and as subtended by that environment’ (Benjamin 1999: 6). This is in contrast to exogenous people at the other end of the spectrum, who are those with a migratory history and are not attached to any particular place. These people recognize that they come from a different place than the one which they inhabit, and to where they may eventually return. Alternatively, they might have such a long migratory history that they are not able to relate themselves to any place at all. They neither consider themselves part of the place they inhabit, nor consider the different areas that surround them as being interlinked. For this reason, they tend to develop a more utilitarian relationship with the locality. This difference is well described by Benjamin (1999: 3): people whose immediate ancestors have always lived in their places of habitation, so far as they know, necessarily maintain a different approach to their social and physical environment than people who inhabit territories that they or their ancestors migrated to. Indigenes’ understanding of their own circumstances is tacit, non-articulated and constantly sustained by the imponderabilia of daily life. Exogenes, on the other hand, suffer much less from such constraint, and are emotionally and cognitively freer to take an exploitative approach to their surroundings. Exogenous people view territory as an ‘object’, ‘open to exploitation by the subjectivity of the selves who inhabit it’ (Benjamin 1999: 7). The distinction between indigeny and exogeny

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corresponds to Marx’s distinction (1970 [1867] vol. 1: 178–179) between ‘land as subject of labour’ versus ‘land as object of labour’. That is, while exogenes think of territories as commodities (‘object’) open to exploitation, indigenes think of land (and the places on it) as the foundation (‘subject’) of their being. Indigenes and exogenes ‘see’ different worlds. This is somewhat like the difference between peasants or tribespeople (whose workplaces are also their homes) and proletarians or entrepreneurs (whose homes and workplaces are quite distinct). (Benjamin 1999: 3)1 Indigeny and exogeny refers to individuals rather than societies. However, when members of a society are educated and socialized, in some very fundamental ways they share values, beliefs, attitudes and thinking, including those that are at the origin of their indigenous or exogenous outlook. This outlook is imbued in their tales, legends and language, and helps to mould the psychology and personality of the members of the group. When members of the group interact, this outlook helps them understand each other and reduce conﬂicts and misunderstandings. It is then the society, through its members, that can be said to be indigenous or exogenous. This does not mean that society is homogeneous, or that all members of the society have the same level of indigeny and exogeny. As mentioned, indigeny and exogeny are graded rather than absolute phenomena. Younger people will be more exogenous than their elders, whilst migrants, including those who have married in distant villages, will have a more exogenous outlook than those who have married, and have lived all their lives in their village of birth. The indigenous outlook of the Karen The indigeny of the Karen seems to be primarily due to the settlement in the village cluster and the social networks that result from marriage. In Karen society, households are generally made up of nuclear families, usually composed of the parents and all unmarried children. After marriage, newly-wed couples usually move in with the bride’s parents, and the groom works with his family-in-law for a few years. Children are often wanted as soon as possible, and when the ﬁrst child is one or two years old, the couple builds a house for themselves near the house of the bride’s parents. If the rule of matrilocal residence is followed, all of the daughters, except the youngest, set up households near their parents’ house. The youngest daughter, together with her husband and children, lives with and looks after her parents until their death. A small village might consist of only one of these matrilineages, or more typically a few matrilineages that are related to each other through the marriage of some of their members. If the matrilocal residence is not followed and the

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couple builds a house near the groom’s parents, then the household is related to the others through the husbands or father. Karen villages tend to be small because the secondary forest swidden farming method is very land intensive. According to my informants, approximately 1 rai is necessary for one person for one year. With a fallow period of 6 years, a family of ﬁve would need 35 rai, 5 rai under cultivation and 30 rai at various stages of fallow. As not all land is suitable for cultivation, and as the subsistence economy needs large areas of forest, a village of 20 to 30 houses is often the norm. When the village grows, the ﬁelds have to be cleared at increasing distances from the village, until it becomes too time-consuming to travel to the ﬁelds on a daily basis. When this occurs, a matrilocal descent group splits from the village and sets up a new village closer to the ﬁelds. In this way, most Karen villages are not isolated but are part of a village cluster, which usually consists of one larger village, surrounded at various distances by daughter villages. Daughter villages might in turn become too large, and be the origin of other daughter villages, each of them with their own land. Mischung (1990) referred to these entities as ‘Siedlungskammern’ (settlement cells). In Karen, this village cluster is called g’waw, and is the ‘extended river valley bilateral joint descent group [which for the Karen is] the basic unit of social identity’ (Marlowe 1969: 54). The village cluster is the social unit of reference for the Karen. It is where they are born, where they grow up, where they marry, where they work and where they die.2 Marlowe (1969: 55) wrote that ‘from a functional point of view, the [village cluster] is the fundamental unit of Karen society in that it is the largest unit whose members are involved in regular and corporate, social, economic, and ritual transactions throughout the year.’ Whilst the Karen are aware of and familiar with everything that happens in the village cluster, they are rather ignorant of what happens outside it as they rarely need to leave it.3 This contributes to their indigenous outlook, making them mistrustful and fearful of what comes from outside the locality, and prompts them to resist the changes that come from there. Contacts between the members of the matrilineage living in different villages occurs daily, but among Animists one ceremony in particular, that of the ‘au’ ma xae, reminds the members of the matrilineage of the relationship that they have. During this ceremony, which is called for when there is a serious illness (Rajah 1984), members of Animist matrilineages get back together. All members of the matrilineage – wherever they live – should attend the ceremony and partake of the food.4 As they are likely to be distributed over different villages of the village cluster (and beyond), this ceremony helps to renew the contacts between lineage members, reminding all villagers of the kin relations that exist between the members of the different villages. In this way, the ‘au’ ma xae ceremony reinforces kinship obligations and restrictions, and revives or restores contacts between geographically dispersed kin members (Buadaeng 2001).

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In some cases, there might be a religious connection between the villages of the village cluster. Sometimes, when the daughter village is created, the villagers take as their village spirit a ‘child’ of the original village spirit, thereby creating a symbolic bond between the two villages (Hamilton 1965: 136). However, the connections fade with time, especially if both grow and are at the origin of other daughter villages. Rather than spiritual connections, what most contributes to the closeness between villages, and to the indigenous outlook of the Karen, is the fact that most individuals marry within the village cluster. A marriage union can lead to two outcomes: ﬁrst, it can broaden the geographic dispersion of the social network, if the bride and the groom come from distant villages; and second, it can strengthen local alliances, if they marry within the village or village cluster of birth. This is the case of the Karen. Marlowe (1969: 65) found that 34 per cent of the Karen in his area of study married within their village, and 44 per cent within their village cluster. Most of them remained in the same village or village cluster after marriage. Hamilton (1965: 269) found that 88 per cent of brides and 54 per cent of grooms married within the village cluster of their parents, and thus probably within their village of birth. In the case of Mae Kha Pu, interviews with an elder revealed that of his 64 descendants and their spouses living in the village cluster, 51 (80 per cent) were born there and 45 (70 per cent) were living in their village of birth. Only 13 (20 per cent) of those who were living in the village cluster after marriage were born outside it. The Karen in Bo Kaeo marry within a slightly larger area. Out of 37 individuals, 19 married a person from the same sub-district, whilst the other 18 married further away. Of the latter, the partners of 8 individuals came from a distance of between 10 and 15 kilometres; those of six individuals came from between 20 and 40 kilometres away, and those of four individuals, from a distance of between 60 and 80 kilometres away. By marrying within the village cluster, the Karen strengthen the social network and the alliances that exist in it, thus helping to prevent or reduce conﬂicts over land, water and other scarce resources. However, marriage within the village cluster prevents the emergence of a geographically dispersed social network, and this results in unease and fear of things outside the locality, which contributes to the indigenous, inwardlooking outlook of the Karen. The larger area into which the Karen of Bo Kaeo marry is a sign of their greater exogeny compared to the Karen in Mae Kha Pu. What can contribute to this lack of dispersion of the Karen in Mae Kha Pu is the fact that the village cluster is rather isolated and that there are presumably sufﬁcient marriage partners in the locality, which reduces the need to look for partners in other areas. However, equally important is the fact that the improvements in the transport network, the presence of Thai and Hmong, and the establishment of primary schools and of Christian missionaries have made the Karen in Bo Kaeo more exogenous than those living in Mae Kha Pu.

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The relationship between individuals: many-strandedness and single-strandedness Apart from the relationship of people with place and space, Table 8.1 also considered the relationship between individuals. According to Benjamin (1999) the two things are often related, with indigenous people relating to each other in what Gellner (1988) called many-stranded social contexts. I now turn to this and introduce the concept before describing what in my opinion makes the Karen rather many-stranded. In some societies, when two individuals interact, they interact in only one social setting – in one form and in one function. In other societies they interact in several social settings, forms and functions simultaneously. Gellner (1988) called these two kinds of social interactions ‘manystranded’ and ‘single-stranded’, many-stranded being those in which people deal with others in a multitude of social contexts. As mentioned above, these types of relations are usually thought to be typical of pre-industrial societies, such as farming or tribal societies. In these societies, when a man for example buys something from a village neighbour [he] is dealing not only with a seller, but also with a kinsman, collaborator, ally or rival, potential supplier of a bride for his son, fellow juryman, ritual participant, fellow defender of the village, fellow council member. All these multiple relations will enter into the economic operations, and restrain either party from looking only to the gain and loss involved in that operation, taken in isolation. In such a many-stranded context, there can be no question of ‘rational’ economic conduct, governed by the single-minded pursuit of maximum gain. Such behaviour would disastrously ignore all the other multiple considerations and relationships which are also involved in the deal, and which constrain it. These other considerations are numerous, open-ended, intertwined and often incommensurate, and hence do not lend themselves to any cost-beneﬁt calculation. Gellner (1988: 44–45; emphasis in original) In contrast, single-stranded social contexts are those in which people have a specialized role and tend to interact with one another in only one function or activity. Two people usually interact either as neighbours or as fellow members of a jury or as shop assistant and customer or as friends. In such circumstances ‘a man making a purchase is simply interested in buying the best commodity at the least price’ (Gellner 1988: 44). These single-stranded social contexts are thought to be typical of industrial or post-industrial societies, as well as of some sectors in pre-modern society, such as long-distance merchant traders.

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The many-stranded social relations in Karen society The many-strandedness of the Karen can be related to their dependency upon one another and the natural environment in the village cluster, which also result in relative equality and a lack of hierarchy. The origin of this outlook can be found in their subsistence farming in secondary forest swiddens. I mentioned above that the subsistence economy of the Karen is dependent upon the sustainable use of the environment. Excessive deforestation compromises the ability of the Karen to collect food in the forest, and increases the costs of raising cattle. To prevent excessive deforestation, the Karen have different methods of inﬂuencing the behaviour of an individual and to limit his freedom. First, there are the pressures exerted upon individuals in the name of the ‘common good’. Karen animists tend to believe that if an individual breaks the customs or offends the spirits, then the village spirits might harm the village by causing an unfavourable harvest or the death of some villagers. As it is in the interest of all villagers that the rules are not broken, they all put pressures on each village member to conform to the ‘Karen way of life’. The fact that all villagers tend to be related makes these pressures quite compelling, forcing the Karen to consider the implications of their actions, and how these will be interpreted by the other individuals in the village cluster – and by the spirits. Second, if these pressures are not sufficient, there is the threat of economic sanctions. A household is too small for many agricultural activities, and all households sometimes need the help of others, whether for clearing the forest, burning the fields, ploughing, planting, transplanting, weeding, harvesting or other agricultural and non-agricultural activities. In such cases, households organize work parties involving individuals from the same or other matrilocal descent groups of the village (Kunstadter 1978). If an individual does not comply with the rules that the Karen are expected to follow, then there is a strong risk that his or her neighbours will, in turn, stop collaborating with that individual, in which case he or she would be unable to farm and would eventually have to leave the village. This threat of exclusion acts as a strong disincentive to break the rules and contributes to the society’s conservatism. However, these pressure are not overly coercive. Whilst there seems to be a degree of coercion in the pressures that are exerted to behave in ‘the right way’, the many-strandedness and conservatism of the Karen is to a large extent voluntary, and accepted as ‘natural’, in the name of a perceived ‘common good’, whose values are entrenched into each Karen from youth (Madha 1980; Shwin 1988).5 The indigeny and manystrandedness of the Karen is well embedded in their tales, traditions and stories, and becomes a way of thinking which leads to the discouragement of rule breaking and of the undertaking of new, unexplored ventures,

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while inducing individuals to continue performing activities that have been ‘tried and tested’ and which are perceived to be ‘normal’. What contributes to the many-strandedness of the Karen is also their relative equality. Although elders and rich people do have a higher status and more inﬂuence in the village’s decisions than younger and poorer people, the differences are not very marked. In an economy where all participate in work parties on their own and other people’s rice ﬁelds, there is little scope for a hierarchical structure to emerge. This relative political and economic equality prevents the emergence of individuals who have sufﬁcient power and independence to ignore the pressures that are exerted upon them. All of these factors prompt the Karen to seek compromises when a conﬂict threatens to arise. Each individual has to be cautious when interacting with others because their behaviour in one setting or as a member of one group also affects the way in which they will be seen in other settings or as a member of other groups.

Karen adaptation to land scarcities and the introduction of cash crops My brief discussion of the indigeny and many-strandedness of the Karen should not give the impression that they have an overly conservative mentality, living in an immutable society, rejecting all changes and being unwilling to take advantage of the new opportunities available. Indeed, the Karen do take advantage of new opportunities, as is shown by the occasional growing of opium to make up for land scarcities, for example in the Doi Ithanon mountain range or Bo Kaeo (Renard 1988), as well as the movement of their villages towards safer areas in the east at the end of the last century (Renard 1979), or the understanding of how to promote sympathy for their causes by collaborating with academics, NGOs and the press (McKinnon’s Chapter 4 in this volume). Rather than putting forward a view of the Karen as passively conservative and risk-averse, I would like to argue that their relative conservatism and attempt to remain subsistence-oriented are related to their values and their level of indigeny and many-strandedness. This determines the way in which they interpret the changes that they are confronted with, their views of the opportunities available, and how they may try to take advantage of these opportunities. Only by understanding the inﬂuence their indigenous and many-stranded outlook has on their decision-making process can one appreciate the reasons for their subsistence orientation. This outlook should not be considered as immutable. I mentioned above that indigeny/exogeny and many-strandedness/single-strandedness are graded rather than absolute phenomena, and that because societies are not uni-dimensional, elements of both characteristics – indigeny and exogeny, single-strandedness and many-strandedness – can exist side by

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side. Moreover, the characteristics that make a society indigenous or many-stranded can change because of a number of transformations caused by population pressures, technological changes, changes in the resource base (e.g. amount of forest available), changes in the system of religious beliefs, etc. When population pressures due to natural increases or the immigration of other groups, or the opening of mines, decrease the ability of the population to use the environment to sustain itself, the origins and justiﬁcation of the Karen’s many-strandedness is challenged, and this contributes to a shift to more single-stranded social interactions. Moreover, the introduction of cash crops allows farmers to pay people to help them, thus reducing the economic rationale for the pressures that can be exerted upon them. Even when a household does not grow cash crops itself, the fact that neighbouring households grow cash crops allows it to avail itself of the opportunities for wage labour. Being educated in Thai schools and following the Thai curriculum has opened the population to the wider outside world, as has the inﬂuence of radio and television. Many Karen listen to the Hill Tribe Radio, which transmits daily news in Karen and other hill tribe languages. This increases their knowledge of outside areas and broadens their horizons, thus making them more exogenous. Also, most villages that are reachable by road are also served with public transport. This strongly increases the mobility of those Karen who cannot afford to buy motorcycles. Proselytizing activities by missionaries also contribute to making the Karen more exogenous and single-stranded. Karen Christian organizations encourage the Karen to break some of their customs and traditions, and provide them with a larger social network when they organize holidays where Karen Christians from many different areas meet and get to know each other, or when they make available halls for Karen Christian students in Chiang Mai. It is not surprising then that not all Karen have the same level of indigeny and many-strandedness. The greater isolation, better availability of land, fewer proselytizing activities of Christian missionaries and the later arrival of a primary school in the locality, have made the Karen in Mae Kha Pu to remain more indigenous and many-stranded than their neighbours in Bo Kaeo. The following section describes how a different level of indigeny and many-strandedness is responsible for the different individual and collective economic choices in the two areas, and for the endurance of a more subsistence-oriented economy in Mae Kha Pu than in Bo Kaeo.

Economic conditions among the Karen of Mae Kha Pu and Bo Kaeo In the following pages, I describe the level of penetration of the market economy in the Mae Kha Pu village cluster and lowland Bo Kaeo, and the way in which the indigenous, many-stranded outlook is responsible for the

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differences between these two areas. I start by looking at the consequences of different levels of single-/many-strandedness in the Mae Kha Pu village cluster and lowland Bo Kaeo. I then consider the main consequence of their indigenous outlook: their preference to work with a trader rather than buying the inputs and selling the outputs independently. Finally, I consider their approach of engaging in birth control to deal with population pressure. The effect of the many-stranded social relations in the Mae Kha Pu village cluster The subsistence orientation of the Karen in the Mae Kha Pu village cluster is shown in Table 8.2. Of the total land under cultivation, 76 per cent is used for subsistence crops – almost exclusively rice. Only 24 per cent of the total land is used for cash crops, of which 75 per cent are marigolds. The village cluster is able to produce almost sufﬁcient rice for subsistence. The population sample of my data set (64 households of the total of approximately 164 households in the village cluster) would be able to produce 4,927.04 tang of rice a year if they were growing rice on all their land. As they consume approximately 5,243.68 tang of rice per year6 they have a land shortage, but this is not very important. They would need only 6.4 per cent more land – 48.08 rai on which they would produce approximately 315.65 tang – to be self-sufﬁcient in rice.7 In the Mae Kha Pu village cluster, most food that supplements the rice diet is grown on the rice ﬁeld with the rice, near the houses, or more often gathered from the forest. Very little food is bought, and for this reason, cash expenditures in the village cluster are very low. Although averages are difﬁcult to calculate because purchases often involve many small items and can vary widely during the life cycle of a household, most households of four or ﬁve individuals maintain that they spend between 2,000 B | and 5,000 B| a year. Most expenditure is for occasional purchases of cans of sardines, eggs, candles, soaps and other small items bought in the two local shops. Table 8.2 Agricultural land use by Karen in the Mae Kha Pu village cluster (in rai)* Subsistence crops Rice

Others

Total

335

10

345 rai (76.33%)

■

Cash crops Marigolds (Tagetes Erecta)

Others

Total

80

27

107 rai (23.67%)

*Fallow land is not included in the table, and no distinction is made between paddies and swiddens.

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I mentioned above that to earn the cash required, the alternative to growing cash-crops is to raise animals or work for cash. Of these methods, raising animals is the more popular in Mae Kha Pu. Most households (71 per cent) raise some cattle and buffalo. Adult cattle and buffalo fetch a relatively high price of 8,000 to 10,000 B | each, and are sold when a household needs large amounts of cash to build a house or to pay a hospital bill or school fees. During the dry season, when no crops are grown, the animals are left roaming in the paddies and the forest. During the rainy season, when rice is grown in paddies and swiddens, most households keep their cattle near the house. As they usually keep only two or three animals, they can collect food from the forest daily. Virtually all households raise pigs. As the pigs grow bigger, their value increases but so does the effort to tend them, and they are gradually sold. In this way, pigs provide a relatively uniform income of 2,000 B | to most households in the village cluster. The other alternative for earning cash is to work on other households’ cash crop ﬁelds. Wage work is almost non-existent in the Mae Kha Pu village cluster as there are few cash crop ﬁelds. In contrast, wage work is relatively common in lowland Bo Kaeo, more on the cash crop ﬁelds of the Hmong and the Thai than on those of the Karen. There is also the possibility of migrating to and working for short periods in the lowlands. Both Karen men and women work locally, but once married only men migrate outside the area, where they might spend a few weeks or months to earn the cash they need for the rest of the year. There is some migration outside the village cluster by young men and women, but most only leave for a few years, and then return. Only the few who gain university degrees (two individuals in the Mae Kha Pu village cluster) have remained in the lowlands. This brief description points to a village cluster that prefers to remain subsistence-oriented. Most land is used to grow rice, the food that supplements the rice diet is collected from the forest, and the little cash that is used is earned in ways that are compatible with the subsistence economy: cattle raising and short-term migration outside the area. As discussed earlier, this subsistence orientation would no longer be possible if more people started to grow cash crops. The whole population would then need more cash to make up for the loss of forest and the polluted streams. However, it is quite obvious that those who would lose most from the introduction of cash crops are the smaller farmers, whose survival is more dependent upon the scavenged food. In the Mae Kha Pu village cluster, the many-stranded outlook of the Karen allows the smaller farmers to put pressures on those with more land not to grow cash crops. Pressures also take the form of meetings organized by the headman to ask people to refrain from growing cash crops. In these meetings, respect for the ‘traditional Karen way of life’ is evoked. This is taken to consist of growing rice for subsistence, ﬁshing in the streams and

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keeping cattle. Those who prefer to continue with this ‘traditional Karen way of life’ can point out (along with other factors) that if people grow cash crops, they would have to use pesticides, and this would pollute the rivers, so that others would no longer be able to ﬁsh or to bathe there. Moreover, if cash crops were grown during the dry season, cattle could no longer be kept in the ﬁelds. Apart from these moral pressures, those who want to continue growing rice are also able to apply economic pressures, since by keeping cattle they can force those who wish to grow cash crops to fence their ﬁelds. This increases their costs, thus reducing the proﬁts from cash crops. However, to be able to exert these pressures, those with land scarcity have to continue to grow rice themselves. By continuing the old way of life, they can prevent others from breaking away from it. Figure 8.2 conﬁrms that those with less land grow slightly more rice than those with more land. Although this pattern is not very pronounced, it conﬁrms the conclusion that I came to after many days of interviews in the village cluster. Figure 8.2 compares the amount of rice and cash crops grown in Mae Kha Pu. The x-axis shows the availability of land to the households, considering their potential to be self-sufﬁcient in rice as the benchmark. Thus, 100 per cent means that the household has exactly what it requires to fulﬁl its rice needs, and 50 per cent means that it has exactly half of what

Percentage of land farmed with rice

100

90

80

70

60

Availability of land (%) Best fit line produced by linear regression (R2 ⫽ 0.6006). Each point represents the average of all households with that amount of land.

Figure 8.2 Land use in the Mae Kha Pu village cluster.

16 0– 17 9

14 0– 15 9

12 0– 13 9

10 0– 11 9

80 –9 9

60 –7 9

40 –5 9

20 –3 9

0– 19

50

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it requires. The y-axis shows the percentage of land that is farmed with rice. Everything else is farmed with either cash crops or other subsistence crops. This is an important way in which the many-strandedness of the Karen affects their economic choices in the Mae Kha Pu village cluster. Below I will describe why such is no longer the case in lowland Bo Kaeo. Those with a land scarcity also gain other advantages from this situation. The rice surplus that is produced by those with a land surplus is sold within the village cluster for 5 B | /litre, or about 30 per cent of the price in the shop for rice of comparable quality. I calculated the value of a one person-day work in the rice ﬁeld to be approximately 25B | when rice is sold at 5 B| /litre (Delang 2002b). However, the salary for a day of work in the cash crop ﬁelds in lowland Bo Kaeo is approximately 80B | . It follows that when one works one day for cash in lowland Bo Kaeo, one is able to buy the rice that it took 3.2 person-days to produce. Hence, those with a land surplus seem to end up working comparatively more than those with a land deﬁcit.8 It might be argued that if those with a land surplus in Mae Kha Pu were growing cash crops, they could employ those with a land deﬁcit. However, with the Karen being risk-averse, most of those with a land surplus would tend to grow cash crops only on land sufﬁciently small to be able to farm it with household labour. Moreover, those with a land deﬁcit are able to go to Bo Kaeo and work there. By walking one or two hours a day to go to work, they end up paying one third of the market price for the rice that they buy. This might also explain the relative popularity of marigolds. This crop does not need pesticides or fertilizers, thus there can be fewer pressures on people not to farm it. Whilst it would give similar proﬁts to rice if the latter was sold at the market price (15 B | /litre), the proﬁt is three times that of rice when the latter is sold to one’s neighbours for 5 B | /litre. As cash incomes are never shared, by growing marigolds those with a rice surplus try to bypass their obligations and the inﬂuence that others can have on their land use choices. It is quite possible that if the village cluster had a land surplus, the villagers would not grow any cash crops at all. Instead, they would perhaps sell their rice surplus in the lowland market, where they do not have obligations to sell it at a subsidized price, or to the Karen in lowland Bo Kaeo, where they would sell it at an intermediate price between that in the market (15 B | /litre) and that in Mae Kha Pu (5 B| /litre). This might explain the very low popularity of cash crops in most Karen villages in the highlands (as described, for example, by Rerkasem and Rerkasem 1994). The effect of greater single-strandedness in lowland Bo Kaeo Also in lowland Bo Kaeo, the Karen prefer to grow subsistence crops rather than cash crops, but the pattern is not as pronounced as in the Mae

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Table 8.3 Agricultural land use by Karen in Bo Kaeo (in rai )* Subsistence crops Rice

Others

Total

343

25

368 rai (60.43%)

■

Cash crops Marigolds (Tagetes Erecta)

Others

Total

100

141

241 rai (39.57%)

*Fallow land is not included in the table, and no distinction is made between paddies and swiddens.

Kha Pu village cluster. Of the total land, 60 per cent is used for subsistence crops and 40 per cent is used for cash crops (Table 8.3). Again, marigolds are the most common cash crop. In lowland Bo Kaeo land scarcities and the lack of forest force people to buy in the local shops both rice and the food that supplements their rice diet. The migration of the Thai and the Hmong, and the opening of a mine in the late 1950s, has created quite severe population pressure. The population of my data set (132 households) consumes approximately 9,123.54 tang of rice per year9 (1 tang ⫽ 20 litres). However, using average values for the productivity of paddy and swiddens, even if they grew rice on all their land they would be able to produce only 6,361.49 tang of rice per year. Therefore, they would need to have about 43.5 per cent more land (2,762 tang or 421 rai ) to be able to fulﬁl their rice needs. Many households can only grow rice for approximately 8 months, having to buy the rest for 4,000 B | to 6,000 B| a year. Moreover, for most households the forest is too distant to make the daily trip to collect food, and many spend about 5,000 B | a year to buy what they cannot collect from the forest. As a consequence, many households spend between 10,000 B | and 20,000 B| a year, considerably more than in Mae Kha Pu. Only about 20 per cent of the households in lowland Bo Kaeo raise cattle or buffaloes. Most of these households raise three animals or less, which in all seasons are often left near the house. The Karen in lowland Bo Kaeo have become more single-stranded than their neighbours in Mae Kha Pu because of the immigration of Thai and Hmong, the presence of missionaries and the longer existence of schools providing formal Thai education. As the members of other ethnic groups do not have the same values, and are equally – or perhaps more – successful in contemporary Thai society, many young Karen no longer consider some dogmas as ‘natural’, and no longer respect them as a matter of course. Increasing inequality has reduced the feeling of brotherhood and common destiny in the villages, and thus the unchallenged, spontaneous respect for some of the values that have thus far been taken for granted.

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Percentage of land farmed with rice

The consequences of this can also be observed in economic choices. There are no meetings organized by the local headmen to ask people to refrain from growing cash crops.10 This does not mean that the Karen in Bo Kaeo have become extremely single-stranded. There are still pressures in the village cluster to behave in predetermined ways. Most households still grow rice, and this is still grown with work parties that include many fellow villagers. Even many of those who do not grow rice participate in these work parties, to show their comradeship with fellow villagers. The pressures that make the Karen manystranded still exist, but they are less powerful than in the Mae Kha Pu village cluster. This is reﬂected in land use. Figure 8.3 shows the amount of rice and cash crops that are grown in lowland Bo Kaeo. As in Figure 8.2, the x-axis shows the availability of land to the households, considering their potential to be self-sufﬁcient in rice as the benchmark. Thus, 100 per cent means that the household has exactly what it requires to fulﬁl its rice needs, and 50 per cent means that it has exactly half of what it requires. The y-axis represents the percentage of land that is farmed with rice. Everything else is farmed with either cash crops or other subsistence crops. Figure 8.3 shows that land use in lowland Bo Kaeo follows the opposite pattern to that in Mae Kha Pu. The more land households have, the more rice they grow. This behaviour is consistent for those who would be able to produce 20 per cent to 119 per cent of their rice needs, whilst those with

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

0–19

20–39

40–59

60–79

80–99

100–119

Availability of land (%) Best fit line produced by linear regression (R2 ⫽ 0.9304). Each point represents the average of all households with that amount of land.

Figure 8.3 Land use in lowland Bo Kaeo.

⬎120

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very little land (below 20 per cent) and with a relatively large amount of land (above 120 per cent) are outliers.11 The pattern in Bo Kaeo seems to be the result of each individual household attempting to fulﬁl its rice needs and earn a limited amount of cash rather than to maximize incomes, a tendency that also emerged from interviews. As those who have less land need more cash to buy their rice deﬁcit, they compensate for their lack of land by growing more cash crops. Two conclusions can be made from a comparison of lowland Bo Kaeo and Mae Kha Pu. First, in spite of the much larger amounts of cash crops grown in lowland Bo Kaeo – and the larger cash expenditures – the level of consumption in the two areas is likely to be very similar. The Karen in lowland Bo Kaeo need to buy some of the things that their neighbours in Mae Kha Pu are able to grow or scavenge for, and the larger amounts of cash crops grown in lowland Bo Kaeo reﬂect the greater need for cash. Second, both types of behaviour result in the reduction of inequality in each area. The lack of inequality is an important concept in Karen society, and the attempt to reduce it led Durrenberger (1983) to call the Karen economy an ‘economy of sufﬁciency’, i.e. an economy in which individuals aim to produce enough to survive rather than to maximize incomes. This approach can probably be traced back to the time when the Karen were subsistence rice farmers living in isolated village clusters. As the local resources were rather limited, having more than necessary meant that others in the village or village cluster – who also happened to be relatives – had to have less than they needed. Therefore, status was given to the individuals who limited their greed, rather than to those who maximized their incomes. This is still partly true today – more so in Mae Kha Pu than in Bo Kaeo – and is changing, only slowly. People’s status still tends to be dependent upon their participation in work parties and upon being a responsible member of the community, willing to help those in need, rather than upon the level of income. In Karen society, the persistence of equality within the village cluster is due to pressures that can be put on individuals to limit their consumption of common property – forest, rivers, and in the past, when land was held in common, also farmland – or to grow a particular crop, such as a surplus of rice, which is to be distributed to those who need it most. When social relations become more single-stranded, for whatever reason, the ethic of sufﬁciency weakens, and as a result inequality tends to increase. Time will tell what consequences this will have on Karen society. Before discussing further consequences of the Karen attempt to reduce inequality, I turn to the effect that their indigenous outlook has on the ways in which they adapt to population pressure and the introduction of cash crops.

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Karen indigeny and the preference for traders The most important consequence of the indigenous outlook of the Karen is probably their reliance upon traders. Traders sell inputs (including seeds or small plants, pesticides and fertilizers) on credit and promise to come to buy the harvests, at a previously agreed price or at the market price minus a commission. Unlike the Hmong, very few Karen prefer to buy inputs from shops and to market the products themselves at harvest time. Hence, traders are the most common source of credit for the Karen and are essential to their cash crop economy. The main reason for this importance of the trader is that the Karen feel they are not sufﬁciently informed of the opportunities available outside their village cluster, including for what crops there is a demand, what prices they should be paid for these crops, and what the market outlets are. Cash crops are considered something under the control of the lowlands, and the Karen fear that if they took their crops to Chiang Mai themselves they would be unable to ﬁnd somebody who wanted to buy them, or that the price paid would be so low that it would not even cover their costs. This fear is strengthened by past experiences, of themselves or their neighbours, who have suffered heavy losses because of crop failures. By working with a local trader all the transactions in which they are involved are conducted in the locality, and they feel that they have more control over the cash crops that they grow. Working with a trader has several other advantages in the eyes of the Karen. First, they do not have to pay for inputs, and are thus guaranteed not to incur any losses in cases of crop failure. If the harvest is too small because of insufﬁcient rain, or the produce does not look very good, then it cannot be sold in the lowland market, and is either consumed by the producers themselves or left in the ﬁelds to rot. As the inputs are sold on credit, the Karen do not need to return any money, and any ﬁnancial losses are absorbed by the traders (in some cases the traders ask the Karen to share the losses, and expect to receive some money). Second, the Karen are sure that someone will come to buy the harvest. As it is the traders who have made the investment, they have an incentive to buy the harvest even though the price might be low. When the price of a crop is high it is easy to sell the crop, and there are even lowland farmers who travel through the highlands offering to buy the harvests. However, this is quite uncommon, and when prices are low it is often difﬁcult to sell the harvest. Thus, the Karen prefer to buy their inputs on credit because they are certain they will sell their harvests, rather than because they do not have the cash to buy them. It is true that for some crops, such as strawberries, the necessary investment is of several thousand baht per rai, and the Karen often do not have sufﬁciently large reserves of funds. However, the most common cash crop of the Karen, marigolds, needs an investment of only approximately 150 B | per rai, and all have sufﬁcient funds.

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Third, buying inputs on credit simpliﬁes the transactions with traders. As the Karen never market the products themselves, and always wait for a trader to come to the village and buy the harvest, buying the inputs on credit from a trader removes one cash transaction. The Karen also expect to be told the price they will be paid for the harvest before they start growing the crop. In the ﬁeldwork area, marigolds and strawberries are the only two crops for which traders agree to sell inputs on credit, and whose prices can be guaranteed by the traders themselves (in the case of marigolds), or whose prices can be estimated fairly accurately because of previous experience in growing the crop (in the case of strawberries). As most crops (such as cabbages, the favourite crop of the Hmong) have prices that are very unstable and the traders cannot guarantee a price for the harvest when they sell the seeds and other inputs, the Karen do not want to grow them. Because of their indigeny and risk aversion, very few Karen are traders. In the sub-district, there are only two Karen traders, compared to eight Thai, even though the Karen are by far the majority of the population. The Karen traders also trade only the safest products, marigolds and strawberries, leaving more risky crops, such as cabbages, to Thai and Hmong traders. Birth control and the ethic of sufﬁciency I argued above that the ability of the Karen to remain subsistence-oriented is dependent upon their capacity to grow sufﬁcient rice for subsistence in the village cluster. The Karen are aware of this, and the solution that they have found is to engage in birth control. Birth control is a solution that results from their indigenous outlook, as that outlook makes them understand the problem of land scarcity as one of lack of land in the village cluster, rather than a lack of land to which to migrate, as the Hmong do. By engaging in birth control the Karen try to reduce the problem of land scarcity in the locality. From the Karen point of view, engaging in birth control is an alternative to growing cash crops. Whilst cash crops would allow the Karen to have more children while maintaining constant per capita incomes, birth control allows them to maintain per capita incomes while growing rice. Birth control as a solution to land scarcity also means that they take it for granted that their children will want to remain subsistence-oriented rice farmers. Contraceptives were ﬁrst introduced into the ﬁeldwork area after the establishment of a health centre in 1957. The availability of modern contraceptives obviously facilitates – and is a pre-requisite for – effective birth control. However, it is not sufﬁcient to provide the technology. People also have to want to use birth control, and the Karen certainly do. Virtually all of the young Karen whom I talked to told me they wanted one or

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two children – with a maximum of three. Justifying their decision, they mentioned their poverty or made statements as ‘we don’t have enough land to give to our children’. Birth control is a voluntary and very conscious decision.12 This is unlike the neighbouring Hmong, who when asked why they do not engage in birth control in spite of experiencing similar land scarcity, maintained that their children, ‘will grow cash crops and make money’, ‘will be able to ﬁnd work elsewhere’ or ‘will migrate to the cities’. As each Karen household decides independently how many children to have, by directly relating the number of children to the amount of land it has, birth control helps to reduce inequality. In the past, inequality in the village cluster was reduced with the yearly redistribution of land. Since land has become an individually owned property, inequality in the village has increased. It is now rice – the product of land – that is distributed, but only the surplus, and if there is no surplus some households have to buy rice in the shops. Thus, unlike the days when land was periodically reallocated, the ability of a household to satisfy its rice needs now depends on the relationship between the amount of land and the size of the household. A household with a large amount of land but with many individuals will still produce a deﬁcit, whilst a household with little land, and fewer members, might produce a surplus. Birth control is seen as the solution to this problem. From interviews, it seems that parents do indeed take into consideration the amount of land they have when they decide how many children to have.13 If this is true, birth control has the effect of reducing the inequality introduced by the private ownership of land. At the same time, it allows those with little land to continue exerting pressure on those with a land surplus to continue growing a surplus of rice, as they themselves continue growing rice. It is difﬁcult to calculate the fertility rate because many people do not keep track of their own age or that of their children. More accurate than estimating the fertility rate is to look at the number of children born per Karen woman over time. Figure 8.4 shows this, grouping mothers in age brackets. The average number of children had by women who are now in the 50–54 to 65–69 age brackets is relatively constant at 4.43. In the early 1970s – when those who are now in the 50–54 age bracket were in the 20–24 age bracket – the Karen seem to have started to engage in birth control, gradually reducing the number of children. This might have coincided with the period when the government started to become stricter in enforcing the law against swiddening, and as a consequence the Karen experienced a period of increasing population pressure. They now seem to have stabilized at about 2 children (the average of the 25–29 and 30–34 age brackets, after which the Karen usually stop having children, is 2.08 children).

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Nr. of children

5 4 3 2 1 0 15–19 20–24 25–29 30–34 35–39 40–44 45–49 50–54 55–59 60–64 65–69

Age bracket of mother

Figure 8.4 Number of children per Karen woman.

Conclusions The secondary forest swiddening that the Karen pursued until at least the 1970s contributed to creating a particular indigenous, many-stranded outlook that makes the Karen inward-looking, conservative and risk averse. This outlook is responsible for determining the way in which the Karen interpret the problem of land scarcity and the opportunities that are available in the market economy, and the way in which they adapt to the new circumstances. Their many-strandedness and the inﬂuence that others can have on the behaviour of each individual discourages rule breaking and the adoption of new ventures, in this case the growing of cash crops. The Karen in Mae Kha Pu seem to continue with the subsistence economy because they can, whilst the Karen in lowland Bo Kaeo have been forced to make a transition to a more cash-oriented economy by the presence of the Thai and the Hmong, who have changed the local economy from a subsistence-oriented to a cash-oriented one. Thus, the subsistence orientation of the Karen is both a choice and a desire that is determined by cultural values, primarily their indigeny and many-strandedness, rather than being imposed upon them or due to material circumstances unfavourable to the cash economy (such as excessive distance from a market or lack of credit). The Karen are gradually becoming more exogenous and singlestranded because of the inﬂuence of the ‘outside world’ – the Thai education system, missionary activities, television, etc. Time will tell how they will react to these changes, but so far their indigenous, many-stranded

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outlook seems to have been rather resilient to outside inﬂuences. Their choice of birth control as a strategy to make up for land scarcity seems to be proof that this outlook is indeed very strong. Future development projects should take into consideration this desire of the Karen to continue doing things ‘as they have always done’.

Notes 1 In French it is possible to make a similar distinction between people who work the land in the countryside, that is, between paysan, who are attached to the pays (the place or land), and fermier, who are attached to farms. 2 The terms that are used by the Karen to address one another in the village cluster might also be an indication of the close relationship that exists between its members. In Karen, the terms that are used to address individuals to whom one is not directly related are usually the same as those that are used for one’s relatives (Hamilton 1965: 123–126). 3 Elders in the Mae Kha Pu village cluster maintain that when they were young, household heads only travelled to a market town once a year with two porters, and that this was sufﬁcient for the rest of the year. Other elders maintained that they had never left it. 4 Amongst many households this rule has been relaxed, and when the members of the matrilineage reside in distant villages and are engaged in activities that bind them to the location, such as salaried jobs or studies, their share of the pig might be brought to them or kept in the house of the matrilineage head until they return to the village. 5 This does not mean that there is no opposition to the control that one sector of society (e.g. village elders) can exercise over another sector (e.g. the youth). For example, Mischung (1984) describes the existence of traditional hta songs that are sung during festivals, with which young people express their grievances against the limits that elders place on their freedom. 6 Rice consumption is calculated using the coefﬁcient described by Epstein (1967: 160), and also used by Lemoine (1972: 146), which considers the age and gender of the consumer. 7 If all households grew only rice, then 22 households would be able to produce a surplus of 1,223 tang, which would almost satisfy the deﬁcit of the 42 households that would only be able to produce 1,737 tang less than they need. Data that are limited to one year have little meaning, as agricultural production varies from one year to the next and had been particularly bad during the ﬁeldwork period and the preceding years. However, in 1999, a year in which the harvest was smaller than usual due to little rain and a large number of insects, 15 households still had a rice surplus, for a total of 690.4 tang. 8 It has to be remembered that by selling their rice at a subsidized price, those with a land surplus gain status because they distribute their wealth. This allows them to be more inﬂuential in the village affairs. If they grew only cash crops, then they might be held in contempt because they would try to maximize incomes rather than help their neighbours in need. 9 See note 6. 10 Since these pressures cannot be exerted on their Thai and Hmong neighbours, meetings may also be seen as meaningless. 11 The fact that they are outliers can be rationalized in the following manner: the households with very much land (120 per cent or more of the land that is necessary to produce sufﬁcient rice for its own consumption) use a decreasing

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percentage of land for rice because they do not want to have a rice surplus. Those with very little land (below 20 per cent) are outliers because by trying to produce at least some of their rice needs they grow a comparatively larger amount of rice. 12 Birth control as a solution to land scarcity is also motivated by the inheritance system, which divides the land among all children, whether male or female, when they marry. Whilst this inheritance system might have been suitable to their secondary forest swiddening system, when land was controlled by the village, it is not suitable to the new conditions, in which land is owned by individual households. If the Karen have more than two children, their land will be slowly divided into increasingly uneconomic units. 13 Of course other considerations also apply, such as aspirations for their children. If they want their children to study then they will have fewer children to be able to pay for their education.

9

The Karen in transition from shifting cultivation to permanent farming Testing tools for participatory land use planning at local level Oliver Puginier

Conﬂicts over natural resources The new government must amend draconic forestry laws and recognize the indigenous people’s constitutional and community rights, to prevent land conﬂicts from escalating into ethnic violence. (Bangkok Post 2000)

The above quote shows the severity of the long conﬂict over water and land in Chom Thong district (Chiang Mai Province) between lowland Thais and highland Karen and Hmong, who have been living and farming in an area that was declared the Doi Inthanon National Park by the government in 1972. In the past, lowland villagers have closed access to roads and set up roadblocks to force relocation of the Karen and Hmong whom they accuse of water overuse. In August 2000 they even raided lychee orchards and set ﬁre to houses, and it was by luck that no one was killed (Bangkok Post 2000). These clashes are a result of the increasing competition over natural resources when land and water become scarce or are overused, and epitomizes the fate of hill tribes in Thailand, caught between recent forest protection laws and lowland Thais moving into the hills. Such conﬂicts concentrate in the upper north, which covers 18 provinces or 33 per cent of the country. The mountains of Thailand were populated by a number of TibetoBurman mountain peoples moving south from China and settling at higher elevations, as well as by northern Thais at lower altitudes (Anderson 1993: 21). Highland peoples have been classiﬁed according to ethnicity and the elevation they live and are spread over 20 provinces, but 90 per cent live in the upper north (ADB 2000: 4). The Karen came up to 300 years ago, followed up to 100 years ago by Yao, Akha, Lahu and Lisu, and up to 80 years ago by the Hmong (Ganjanapan 1998: 75). Recent settlement since World War II followed a pattern of gradual expansion to higher elevations into the uplands and highlands. In Thailand, elevations

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Metres 2,000 Tropical evergreen forest

1,500 Hmong Coniferous forest

Yao Akha Lahu Lisu Karen

1,000 Lua

Northern Thai HIGHLANDS

Dry dipterocarp forest

Mixed deciduous forest

500

UPLANDS

Northern Thai Swiddens

200 LOWLANDS

Paddy fields

Figure 9.1 Mountain settlement transect (after Kunstadter et al. 1978: 8).

up to 500 metres ASL are deﬁned as ‘uplands’, while elevations exceeding 500 metres are referred to as ‘highlands’ (Buddee 1985: 19). The resulting present range of mountain settlement is illustrated in a transect (Figure 9.1). The farming systems in the northern highlands are based on shifting cultivation, with historically three types of swiddening based on the relationship between cultivation and fallow periods (Kunstadter et al. 1978: 7):

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Short cultivation–short fallow (northern Thai); only supplementary to irrigated wet-rice cultivation in transitional zones between valley and hill lands at elevations between 200 and 800 metres ASL. Short cultivation–long fallow (Karen, Lua); rotational swiddening on sloping land in addition to wet-rice cultivation on terraced ﬁelds at elevations between 700 and 1,400 metres ASL. Long cultivation–very long fallow (Hmong, Yao, Akha, Lahu and Lisu); pioneer swiddening on steep slopes and opium cultivation as a cash crop at elevations between 800 and 2,000 metres ASL.

Forest resources in the highlands have been subject to increasing pressures. These have been affected by two parallel developments of rapid population growth and a drastic disappearance of forest cover, from 60 per cent in 1938 (RFD 1993) to as low as 15 per cent in 1996 (Maxwell 1997), both of which have been blamed exclusively on the hill tribes. Land resources have become very scarce, to the point that the fallow period of swidden farming has been reduced to one or two-year fallows and has been characterized as ‘degraded’ (Ganjanapan 1998: 76). The term degraded refers to too short fallow periods for soil fertility restoration, fewer grown species and the appearance of indicator species of degraded land. The demand for natural resources has recently become very strong in the middle zone (600–1,500 metres altitude) mainly inhabited by Karen, which has experienced a population increase as a result of a migratory ﬂow away from the high zone due to government resettlement programmes, as well as Thais moving in from the lowlands (and also their own population increases). The competition for land is such that it is dubbed the ‘Middle Zone Crisis’ (Tan-Kim-Yong 1993: 73). Yet the hill tribe population is only partly responsible for the population pressures at middle altitudes. A survey by Rerkasem and Rerkasem (1994: 33) has revealed that the immigration of Thai farmers has contributed to deforestation more than all the hill tribes combined. Even though the hill tribe population has increased during the last decades, it still accounts for only 1.6 per cent of the total population in Thailand (Table 9.1). The national population density has risen to 120 people/km2, while Mae Hong Son Province, where the research work was carried out, has the lowest population density nationwide of 18 people/km2. The proportion of hill tribes has remained at 50 per cent of the provincial population throughout the last four decades. The controversies regarding the negative environmental impacts of shifting cultivation reﬂect the different problem perceptions of hill tribe farmers (as the dominant primary stakeholders who make a living from the highlands) and government agencies that have mandates to administer the highlands as protected reserve forests, where no agriculture or settlements are permitted according to national forest policy. However, the problem complex extends beyond the mere application of restrictive

26.3 34.4 57.0 61.7

1960a 1970a 1991b 1999c

51.3 67.0 111.1 120.2

Density (people/km2) 217 284 750 990

Hill tribes (thousand) 0.8% 0.8% 1.3% 1.6%

Proportion hill tribes 80.8 104.2 174.8 232.5

Total (thousand)

6.4 8.2 13.8 18.3

Density (people/km2)

For Mae Hong Son Province Area: 12,681 km2

Sources: aKunstadter et al. (1978: 27) and Young (1962: 5); bRerkasem and Rerkasem (1994: 6); cADB (2000: 6).

Total (million)

Year

Population of Thailand Area of Thailand: 513,115 km2

Table 9.1 Population growth over 40 years

n.a. 49 107 123

Hill tribes (thousand)

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forest protection laws and planning for agricultural diversiﬁcation to a multidimensional one calling for mediation and conﬂict resolution to overcome two sets of congruent dichotomies: 1 2

forest protection versus agricultural sustainability; centralized policy deﬁnition versus local implementation.

The northern highlands are therefore a prime example of a conﬂicting situation arising when a centralized government system with contradictory priorities of forest preservation and social integration of ethnic minorities extends its control to the remote areas, where traditional shifting cultivation practices clash with centralized planning. The range of issues indicates that forest degradation and natural resource use are complex and highly political, hence it is important ﬁrst to examine the changing political framework affecting the hill tribes directly, as well as the wide range of highland development projects with foreign support. In order to identify and then help to overcome this situation the research applied a participatory land use planning approach at village and sub-district level (Tambon in Thai) in Mae Hong Son, with the help of illustrative tools like topographic models and village land use maps drawn by villagers themselves. These are meant to serve as communication tools to support the Karen in their negotiations with government agencies, so as to work towards compromises acceptable by all stakeholders. In the absence of a legal framework, such an approach naturally leads to a range of conﬂicts like land tenure and conﬁscation. However, Thailand has embarked on a path of political decentralization supported by the new constitution of 1997, and this creates opportunities for an institutionalization of participatory planning approaches at local level. The Tambon is the lowest level of political representation and is thus the suitable planning platform where the state meets society.

Government policies and hill tribe priorities Government political and administrative policy affecting tribal populations changes continually. (Chotichaipiboon 1997: 100) This statement summarizes the government’s ambiguous political positions towards hill tribes, as the previously autonomous mountain peoples were more and more exposed to development agencies with different priorities. The process has been dubbed a ‘carrot and stick’ policy of welfare and development activities on the one hand, and threats of law enforcement measures on the other (Dirksen 1997: 330). This characterization describes the approach of the Ofﬁce of Narcotics Control Board (ONCB) towards drug abuse control, but since it also became the main

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agency for bilateral development projects, the description may be extended to other areas like forest management. The policy development essentially followed a gradual process of centralized forest control and settlement, via intermediate steps of master plans for highland development and most recently the new constitution that emphasizes the participation of local communities. From centralized forest control to plans for highland development In terms of land and forest policy, effects on hill tribes were ﬁrst felt indirectly from the Royal Forest Department (RFD) established in 1896 (under British leadership). Until 1953 and under the impression of unlimited forest resources, forest harvest was in the national interest for income generation, and emphasis was placed on regulated forest exploitation of, mainly, teak in this ‘Phase of Exploitation’ ( Jantakad and Gilmour 1999: 93). Selective teak logging led to only slow deforestation (Delang 2002a: 489). The ﬁrst attempts at setting aside protected forest areas were made in the form of the Forest Conservation Act in 1913. This was followed by the Forest Protection Act in 1938 and the Forestry Act in 1941. The latter provided the most comprehensive coverage of forest law, including felling of tree species and activities on lands not under private ownership. The year of 1954 was the most important one for RFD in terms of land acquisition, for 50 per cent of the country was declared forest land under the management of RFD. The next phase was marked by a period of contradiction between national development policy and forest protection. National planning in ﬁve-year cycles was initiated, and the First National Economic and Social Development Plan (NESDP 1961–1966) encouraged the exploitation of forest resources to attract foreign currency. While forest exploitation peaked and the export-oriented agriculture expanded rapidly, a series of acts to protect the nation’s natural resources were passed, namely the Wildlife Reserves and Conservation Act of 1960, the National Parks Act of 1961 and the National Forest Reserves Act of 1964 ( Jantakad and Gilmour 1999: 95). Vast tracts of forested land were set aside by the RFD to protect and preserve them from human intervention. The National Forest Reserves Act declared all forest land as protected forests with strict limitations on settlement and farming, thereby bringing in the notion that exploitation was changing towards conservation. The enforcement of conservation resulted in the forceful relocation of villages to the lowlands (Chotichaipiboon 1997: 98). As laudable as these efforts to protect the environment may seem, one wonders if the construction of a highway bisecting the ﬁrst national park Khao Yai (established 1962), with a golf course in the middle of the park, was carried out for wildlife protection or for recreation. A number of hill tribe villages situated within the park boundaries were forcefully removed by the forest department. This example illustrates the

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general situation hill tribes were facing, namely that suddenly most of them found themselves living illegally by law in areas they had settled a long time ago. In addition, many of them were not considered Thai citizens, and therefore they had no civil rights (Aguettant 1996: 59). In the early 1970s there was a policy shift towards the legalization of rapidly expanding forest settlements. In 1975, the RFD was charged with the establishment of ‘Forest Villages’ in degraded forest areas and issued land allotment certiﬁcates, supplemented by infrastructural development for permanent settlement. The same cabinet resolution was extended to illegal residents of non-watershed areas in national reserved forests and was called the National Forest Land Allotment Project or STK (Hafner and Apichatvullop 1990: 337). The main ofﬁcial objective was to legalize squatters by means of land use rights in order to stop the uncontrolled occupation of forest land, yet under this guise there were also attempts by the government to gain control of remote areas that became a refuge for opponents of the military regime (Delang 2002a: 489). One has to remember that the Vietnam War had just ended and that Communist insurgents were hunted by the state in their bases in remote forests. However, Thais were able to use the policy better than hill tribes and as a result lowlanders were able to take possession of forest areas while hill tribes were evicted, and land sale occurred at an increasing rate. The policy backﬁred completely in that it started a vicious circle of forest clearance for timber and land sale, instead of the intended rehabilitation of degraded areas. The hypocrisy of this approach is obvious when considering that hill tribes were caught between the political fronts, for not only were they excluded from STK allotment certiﬁcates, but they were also resettled by force to areas easier to control. As a reaction to the continuous rapid deforestation, the RFD formulated a watershed classiﬁcation in 1983, which was intended as a scientiﬁc basis for reforestation efforts. The classiﬁcation divided forests into ﬁve classes according to physical features, placing most of the highlands in Watershed Class 1A (Table 9.2). Land classiﬁed in Watershed Class 1A implied the prohibition of any form of settlement or agricultural activity. Since most hill tribes lived and practised shifting cultivation in these areas, their livelihood suddenly became illegal and they were considered unlawful squatters (Tangtham 1992: 5). This was followed by the ﬁrst national forest policy in 1985, which set national forest targets of 40 per cent (15 per cent conservation and 25 per cent production forest), and declared that all land with slopes of 35 per cent or more were to remain forest land. Hence the watershed classiﬁcation became ofﬁcial policy. The forest targets were reversed in 1987, with 25 per cent conservation and 15 per cent production forests, thus putting more emphasis on conservation. At the same time most of the country’s national parks were established, though often without considerations for local people already living there. As a reaction to massive landslides that killed

Physical environment

High elevation (⬎500 m), very steep slopes (⬎35%) High elevation and very steep slopes (⬎35%) Similar to 1A, but partly cleared for agriculture or settlement High elevation and steep to very steep slopes Uplands (200–500 m) with steep slopes Gentle sloping lands Gentle slopes, ﬂat areas

Watershed class

Class 1 Class 1A Class 1B Class 2 Class 3 Class 4 Class 5

Table 9.2 Watershed classiﬁcation of 1983 (after Tangtham 1992: 5)

Protected or conservation forest, headwater source Permanent forest cover To be reforested or kept in permanent agroforestry Commercial forest, with logging and grazing Fruit tree plantation, agricultural crops, grazing Upland farming, row crops, grazing, fruits Lowland farming, paddy and other ﬁeld crops

Proposed management

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many people in the south of Thailand, commercial logging was banned in 1989 (Pragtong 1993: 115). Yet as it dawned that laws alone do not protect the forests, there was a gradual paradigm shift towards communal forest management. In 1991 the issue of communal forest conservation led the RFD to draft a Community Forestry Act that focused on reforestation schemes (Amornsanguansin 1992: 43). The act has since been a highly controversial political issue, for it implied that the RFD would relinquish the control over the nation’s forests in favour of natural resource management by local communities as well as forest settlement. There have been a series of various Community Forestry Act drafts with differing perspectives between the RFD and people’s versions, but a compromise has yet to be reached. The initial euphoria has even led the community forestry section of RFD to produce a Thai Forestry Sector Master Plan in 1993 that called for power devolution to communities (RFD 1993, vol. 2: 3): Local communities and individual villagers will have decision-making powers entrusted to them concerning the forest resources they depend on. The plan has never been implemented as it lacked provisions for effective participation of key stakeholders and unleashed a major power struggle between the RFD and other agencies, as well as within the RFD, over the control of Thailand’s forests. Since then the conﬂict has remained in a political stalemate and no policy approach on community forestry has translated into a tangible, ofﬁcially endorsed government legislation. National planning in ﬁve-year cycles eventually extended to the highlands and produced the First (1992–1996) and Second (1997–2001) Master Plans for Highland Development and Narcotic Crops Control, though a third plan has not been formulated. The two plans focus on the socio-economic improvement of hill tribes, their settlement in permanent villages, community organization and environmental conservation (RTG 1997). Highland administration is carried out by eight ministries (Interior, Agriculture, Education, Public Health, Labour and Social Welfare, Defence, Internal Security, as well as Science, Technology and Environment) and eighteen departments, yet the unresolved power struggle over forest resources inhibits an effective operation. A parallel development has been a shift towards political decentralization, resulting in the Tambon Council (TC) and Tambon Administrative Organization (TAO) Act in March 1995. The objective of the legislation is the propagation of democracy at grass-roots level by organizing villages into Tambons (sub-districts), with elected village leaders having mandates for local government functions (Nelson 2000: 17). Prior to this act, government representation and budget authority rested with the district ofﬁce, yet the unresolved forest tenure renders the implementation of the TAO Act very difﬁcult. A positive signal at national level comes from the new

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constitution of 1997, which goes even as far as deﬁning new roles for the government in support of local communities (Clause 46), as well as participatory planning and decision-making (Clause 78) over budgets for infrastructural development ( Jantakad and Gilmour 1999: 99). Government decentralization was subsequently embedded in the Eighth National Economic and Social Development Plan (NESDB) (1997–2001), which states: Local people and community organisations should be urged to play an increasingly active role in the management of natural resources and environments. (NESDB 1997) Linked to forest management is the long-standing controversy over forest settlement. In accordance with national planning, three cabinet resolutions were passed in April 1997 recognizing forest dwellers, provided they could prove their long-term settlement by means of allotment certiﬁcates or continuous sustainable land use. This situation suddenly created an atmosphere of openness between hill tribes and the Royal Forest Department in terms of revelation of land use in the hope of ofﬁcial acceptance, particularly since it softened the previous very restrictive conservation laws aimed at removing people from forests. Under this new legislation, the demarcation of land by hill tribes, together with local watershed protection efforts, gained renewed momentum in the hope of ofﬁcial acceptance and land security, such that the documentation was in the interest of the people themselves. Unfortunately, policy decisions are easily overturned with changing governments. With the assumption that forest settlement leads to deforestation, the April 1997 resolutions were cancelled under the new government in June 1998 (Ekachai 1998: 11). However, the question of whether effective forest protection should concentrate on inhabited areas instead of national forest reserves is seen in a new light in Thailand since the Salween forest logging scandal in Mae Hong Son, exposed in early 1998. RFD ofﬁcials, while claiming to be the protectors of the forest, participated in illegal teak logging (Kaopatumtip 1998: 11). This is yet another example of the hyprocrisy of ofﬁcial declarations on conservation with the simultaneous exploitation of the forests for recreation and logging. Policies for forest management and their application therefore continue to be in a state of ﬂux. The plethora of policies has led to a situation whereby hill tribes are caught between two opposing ministerial priorities; namely, the reforestation of forest reserves versus the registration of permanent villages, including a classiﬁcation according to the potential for permanent cultivation (RTG 1997): 1

The restoration of forest cover to 25 per cent conservation and 15 per cent production forest, enforced by the Royal Forest Department

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(RFD, Ministry of Agriculture), using the restrictive watershed classiﬁcation. The implementation even led to forceful resettlement of hill tribes (Bangkok Post 1994; The Nation 1998). Village registration with a Thai name and number as well as with village boundaries by the Department of Local Administration (DOLA, Ministry of Interior), classiﬁed by population and long-term residence. There is a progression from satellite village with no ofﬁcial status to key village with recognized village leaders, irrespective of whether these villages are located in protected forest areas (Aguettant 1996).

Hill tribe priorities and development initiatives Irrespective of government priorities, hill tribes face problems like inadequate nutrition, low income, production below self-sufﬁciency level, shortage of land, and lack of land security (Anonymous 1998, vol. 1: 51). This means that hill tribes are primarily seeking food self-sufﬁciency and resource tenure to meet their subsistence needs, as well as village registration to access government services, prior to modifying their traditional farming systems towards permanent farming. Development priorities at national level thus do not match problem priorities at local level, hence there is a considerable gap between national policy and local problems. Nevertheless, hill tribes have responded to government initiatives in order to seek a compromise. By reducing the extent of forest areas under swidden farming and gradually adapting to permanent ﬁelds with integrated agroforestry, as well as soil and water conservation measures, hill tribes are attempting to make a compromise with the government, a process that resembles a ‘land deal’. In exchange for their adaptations, they expect ofﬁcial government recognition including permanent settlement, and the promised provision of extension support. To help deal with the livelihood problems, hill tribes have often sought support from the wide range of foreign-funded highland development programmes that were started in the late 1970s. Highland development was based on the government priority of the eradication of opium cultivation in the famous ‘Golden Triangle’, which was initiated by the establishment of the Thai Central Committee for Drug Abuse Control in 1975 (Renard 1997: 316). The Ofﬁce of Narcotics Control Board (ONCB) became the Thai coordinating agency for international projects. This shows the emphasis there was at that time on drug control, and although other government departments were later included as implementing agencies, ONCB remained the main line agency right until most projects were phased out by 1998 (Dirksen 1997: 333). The three lead implementing bodies were the Royal Forest Department (RFD), the Department of Land Development (DLD), both belonging to the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives, and the Department of Public Welfare (DPW) under the Ministry of Interior. Development programmes peaked with a total of 168

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agencies from 31 government departments and 49 international donors in the late 1980s (Ganjanapan 1997: 205). The Thai-German Highland Development Programme (TG-HDP) was the longest running Regional Rural Development Project (1981–1998), with a multisectoral approach that included infrastructure, community development, drug abuse control, and agriculture/social forestry in Mae Hong Son and Chiang Rai Provinces. The work now described was part of the agricultural/forestry component.1 This component can roughly be divided into three successive phases; namely crop replacement, soil and water conservation and eventually community-based natural resource management. Encouraged by the ﬁrst foreign-funded project that embarked on a participatory land use planning approach, namely the UN-Sam Mun Highland Development Project (1987–1994; Tan-Kim-Yong 1993), the TG-HDP developed the Community Based Land Use Planning and Local Watershed Management (CLM) approach. The aim was an improved use of land, water and forests, a rehabilitation of watershed catchment areas and an intensiﬁed agricultural production (Borsy and Eckert 1995: 3). The approach was encouraged by the relaxation of the Royal Forest Department (RFD) on its strictly protective mandate, as communal forest management seemed an option backed up by the Community Forestry Act as well as the Thai Forestry Sector Master Plan. The CLM approach was initiated in 1990 in three villages of Mae Hong Son Province, and at the time of project closure in 1998, it had expanded to thirty villages in the project areas of Nam Lang and Huai Poo Ling. The ﬁrst target villages were inhabited by Lahu, but this chapter focuses on the subsequent application of CLM in Huai Poo Ling sub-district that is populated exclusively by Karen. Planning strongly relied on three-dimensional topographic models for mapping out the following land categories together with villagers: • • • • •

village and housing area including home gardens; arable land for annual crops and pasture areas; arable land for perennial crops and agroforestry; social and community forest land; watershed areas and conservation forest.

‘Outer user boundaries’ were also delineated, beyond which no activities were permitted. These were meant to represent village boundaries for ofﬁcial registration with DOLA. By displaying this information on threedimensional land use models made of cardboard or polystyrene to a scale of 1:8,000, it was possible to measure areas and display land use to outsiders. The whole approach was meant to operate via Land Use Planning Teams (LUPT) composed of DLD, RFD and DOLA ofﬁcials together with TG-HDP staff. In the ﬁnal project phase (1995–1998), the TG-HDP focused on updating the models and on aggregating land use information at Tambon level (Anonymous 1998).

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A case study of participatory land use planning The use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) In order to go beyond land demarcation and to carry this process up from village level to higher planning at sub-district and district level, the research project examined possibilities of entering the data from village maps into a Geographic Information System (GIS), so as to provide information that is understandable by all stakeholders. A GIS consists of various components, starting with the incorporation of geographical data from remote sensing sources or maps which is then converted into a computer-readable form. This data can be manipulated and different data themes, such as land cover and soil types, can be overlaid for analytical operations. The results can then be disseminated to relevant stakeholders, mostly in the form of maps. The various computer programs that have been developed can more easily be linked with satellite images for data acquisition and presentation. The data are available in the form of maps, statistics and tables, though these have often been compiled at different formats and scales. The use of a GIS may help overcome the lack of a common base map for the assessment and management of natural resources such as forests, water sources, protected areas, agricultural land and village locations. Yet the exposure of land use to authorities can have undesired consequences for farmers, including land conﬁscation. Data management and local interests are controversial in the unclear Thai policy framework and can be linked to the wider issue of whether planning with the local people is more effective for natural resource protection than restrictive laws and forceful relocations. Building on the CLM approach, it was important to document ﬁrst the achievements of the project and to integrate the resulting land uses of Karen villages into a computer database for subsequent modiﬁcation and upgrading for future planning to produce: • • •

durable and easily transportable maps recognized by all parties; aggregated information at sub-district level for regional planning; a tool that allows regular updating of land use data for the highlands.

The use of a GIS may help overcome the lack of a common map base for the identiﬁcation of natural resources and village locations, but there are also challenges. Scaling up to show local concerns as well as broad regional or national perspectives is important, so that local priorities can be integrated into regional plans (Abbot et al. 1998: 30). The issue of data management versus the inﬂuence of local political interests is crucial. It is expected that improved data management may help resolve conﬂicts between villagers and government agencies, accelerate the issuance of land titles, and assist in determining sustainable forms of agriculture. Yet

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at the same time, there is a real risk that the revelation of land use to authorities can lead to conﬁscation of land. Research methodology After an overview of the work in the villages with the digitized maps, I will describe the work carried out in two Karen villages in Tambon (subdistrict) Huai Poo Ling. This will illustrate the range of issues related to the productive or prejudicial use of maps, and its implications for officially registered villages. An aggregated Tambon map intended for natural resource planning by the newly emerging Tambon Administrative Organizations (TAO) explores these issues further. Digitized land use maps were produced using the following procedure. Hand-drawn land use maps produced by villagers were collected in all the ten CLM target villages of Tambon Huai Poo Ling. The village maps were digitized using a hand digitizer into the GIS program ArcInfo and then converted into maps using the map-drawing program ArcView. Contour lines were obtained from the Remote Sensing Center of Chiang Mai University (CMU) to give a three-dimensional perspective, with 20-metre intervals for the village maps and 100-metre intervals at sub-district level. The location of roads and streams, as well as the Tambon boundaries for Huai Poo Ling, were obtained from the Survey Section of the Northern Narcotics Control Ofﬁce (NNCO) in Chiang Mai in digitized form and overlain with the remaining data. The different land categories were then colour coded, using the same colours as on village maps. Maps were displayed using the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinates with grid points in steps of 1 km2 for village maps and 5 km2 for the sub-district map. The polygons for different land categories were added for area calculations. The same procedure was applied to Tambon Huai Poo Ling and aggregated. As the resulting map was aggregated from individual village maps, neighbouring villages often had overlapping outer user boundaries, which were signiﬁcant in the case of land disputes and ofﬁcial village registration (Puginier 2002: 68). Once the maps had been digitized and printed, they were taken back to villages for modiﬁcations or corrections, with the aim to later distribute them in plastiﬁed A1 size to villages for longer-term use. Digitized printouts were also distributed to other agencies for use in discussing land use issues at Tambon or district meetings. Maps were also distributed to district forest ofﬁcials to facilitate their work in land-use monitoring. The data and the GIS software were then transferred to the Survey Section of NNCO and to the International Center for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) ofﬁce in Chiang Mai that collects this data for all of northern Thailand. As the activities were only carried out within a limited research framework, it is now up to government agencies to decide on the further application of the methodology and subsequent modiﬁcations.

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Tambon Huai Poo Ling Tambon Huai Poo Ling (397 km2) is one of ﬁve sub-districts of Mae Hong Son central district, and one third of the area lies in the Nam Tok Mae Surin National Park that was established in 1981. Huai Poo Ling is exclusively populated by Karen (Sgaw) and the population density changed between 1990 and 1998 from 6 to 10 persons/km2, or from 2,500 inhabitants to over 3,500 inhabitants. Eighty per cent of the Tambon was classiﬁed in Class 1A, which implies that the area is protected forest and no settlement is allowed (Anonymous 1991: 3). However, since the villagers preserve their forests so well, the satellite images that were used for surveying showed a dense forest cover for the area. This is a paradox situation, in that Karen farmers who practise a sustainable system of forest and land management are threatened with eviction, while those in areas of permanent forest removal are allowed to remain there. The TG-HDP proposed a revised version of land use which was meant to give farmers more land to sustain themselves by shifting 18 per cent of the land that was in class 1A to 1B, thereby allowing agroforestry. Yet after the breakdown of Land Use Planning Teams, the proposal was rejected by the Royal Forest Department, hence there has never been a written agreement with RFD on the revised watershed classiﬁcation, nor on land security for settlement and farming. Huai Hee village Huai Hee was founded 170 years ago and is now inhabited by 196 Karen. It became officially registered as a key village (No. 8) in 1983, thereby gaining permanent settlement status and access to government infrastructure. The village is bordered by the Nam Tok Mae Surin National Park to the West and had agricultural area within the national park in the past. Due to pressure from the Royal Forest Department this land had to be abandoned. Although the topographic model includes an outer user boundary, the village map does not (Figure 9.2), which is an indication that the concept of an outer boundary is not quite accepted by villagers. The total village area is 1,700 ha, of which 1,084 ha are conservation forest (64 per cent), while 36 per cent of the land is used for agriculture. Some upland area still lies outside the demarcated agricultural area, an indication that ﬁxed areas are not yet part of the villagers’ perception of government land use planning priorities. This is understandable since the CLM approach has not given land security to farmers and they therefore do not feel committed to abiding by these demarcations. Of the total agricultural area of 466 ha, only 5 per cent on average has been used during the last 3 years, though this amount may increase depending on food requirements. With shorter fallow periods as a result of gradual

Figure 9.2 Land use map of Huai Hee village.

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intensiﬁcation, rice yields decrease as the soil cannot regenerate. Farmers are pressurized by the RFD to cultivate as little land as possible, and at the same time if they extend the fallow period, then the RFD considers the tree regrowth as forest land and forbids further cultivation, an almost absurd situation without land security. The traditional system is clearly in conﬂict with the purely protective interests of the RFD, in spite of selfimposed resource use rules to show a commitment to conservation (Box 9.1).

Box 9.1. Natural resource regulations of Huai Hee village 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Only villagers may cut timber and they may only use it in the community. Permission to cut timber has to be sought from the village committee. No chainsaws are permitted. Trees cannot be cut in conservation forest or near streams. Anyone who sees community forests on ﬁre must extinguish them. Agricultural areas can only be burnt after a ﬁrebreak has been built and permission sought from the village committee. Hunting in conservation forest is prohibited. Fishing with explosives, electric shocks or poison is prohibited. Fines for contravention amount to 100–500 baht to the village committee.

When interviewed about the discrepancy over the outer village boundary, the village committee ﬁrst replied that they forgot to demarcate it, but when pressed further mentioned the controversies over the proposed agreement with the forest department on land for agroforestry use by the village, which was never implemented. In the atmosphere of openness following the April 1997 cabinet resolutions, villagers perceived a renewed hope for land security and ofﬁcial recognition by the RFD. However, following the cancellation of this resolution, the insecurity over which land villagers are allowed to cultivate persists; hence an outer user boundary does not have as much signiﬁcance for farmers as it did for the village extension workers of the TG-HDP. In the situation of land insecurity, the main fear is land conﬁscation by the RFD if fallow periods are too long and trees have grown too big, hence the paradox that was identiﬁed at the beginning if the TG-HDP intervention persists (Anonymous 1991: 3). The fear of land conﬁscation even grew stronger right after the closure of the TG-HDP in 1998, for now the village does not have an agency that defends its priorities anymore, and although Huai Hee does have TAO

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members, they expressed little conﬁdence in negotiating the rights of the village through this government body. Huai Tong village Huai Tong is an old Karen village (key village No. 5) of over 100 years settlement and has grown from a population of 150 in 1964 (year of registration) to 462 people with 112 households. The village boundary was demarcated in 1996 with the arrival of the CLM programme of the TGHDP, but the land use model is in a state of decay. The total village area is 1,988 ha, of which 1,345 ha or 67 per cent are forest, while 644 ha are used for agriculture (33 per cent). Some farmers still have land in neighbouring Chiang Mai Province to the east and will probably lose it once village boundaries are enforced rigorously. The mapped area on the model does not cover the whole village, and a map updating exercise was unsuccessful due to limited mapping skills. The exercise revealed that the concept of a ﬁxed village boundary is still a new concept to the Karen, as it does not correspond to the traditional perception of their environment. In the absence of a communal land title a ﬁxed boundary is perceived as externally imposed. Since the village has been permanent for a long time and was registered nearly 40 years ago, the fear of relocation was low, but several villagers had lost swidden areas to the RFD for reforestation and expected this to happen again after the closure of the TG-HDP. The village boundary will be an issue in future, since it was redrawn when its former neighbouring satellite village of Huai Poo Loei was registered as a key village (DOLA 1995). Here again the villagers’ own demarcation was ignored and 30 per cent of the land is beyond the boundary (Figure 9.3). For village registration, ofﬁcials drew the boundary without asking villagers and the resulting modiﬁed boundary was not given to the village. Villagers were afraid of losing land and requested a copy of the village registration document; they appreciated the display in the map, as they now had a clear illustration of the discrepancies between the demarcation of their land use and what government agencies consider as Huai Tong farmland. The RFD staff started to conduct a detailed survey of agricultural ﬁeld sizes, so that villagers fear they may lose ﬁelds with the policy of the Mae Hong Son Governor, who only allows for 2-year fallows on uplands to reduce the total cultivation area. Additionally, only two upland ﬁelds are permitted and the RFD has conﬁscated trees with breast height diameters of more than 10 cm in fallow areas to declare them permanent forest areas, which is a similar situation to the fallow areas of Huai Hee village. One strategy in response to the threat of losing land by villagers is to plant hedgerows between fallow areas in order to show to RFD ofﬁcials that the land is being used. It seems almost ironic that farmers have to resort to such tactics to keep their land, but in this uncertain situation of an

Figure 9.3 Land use map of Huai Tong village.

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insecure land deal, that is the best villagers can do to maintain their cultivation areas. In spite of this unresolved situation, Huai Tong has formulated village land use regulations under the inﬂuence of the TG-HDP (Box 9.2). Box 9.2. Natural resource regulations of Huai Tong village 1 2 3 4 5

Limited wood cutting only in conservation forest, no farming (ﬁne 1,000 baht). No chainsaw allowed and no logging for sale (ﬁne 5,000 baht). Do not burn the forest (ﬁne 500–1,000 baht). No sale of agricultural areas to outsiders. Permission for woodcutting must be obtained from the village committee.

Land use map aggregation at Tambon level The village maps were aggregated on a sub-district map, and the white areas indicate villages that lie outside the TG-HDP project area (Figure 9.4). It is interesting to note that the village of Pa Kaa lies outside the Tambon boundary (in neighbouring Pai district in fact), if the data provided by ONCB are correct. To date there exist no reliable maps from the Royal Survey Department indicating Tambon boundaries. But even more important is the fact that there are overlapping areas claimed by adjacent villages, which may lead to conﬂicting claims over its use, particularly since DOLA draws even other boundaries at registration. The total upland area (under shifting cultivation) of 6,200 ha makes up some 17 per cent of the whole Tambon area, or with perennial crops paddy ﬁelds and land used in the last 3 years amounts to 7,600 ha or 20 per cent of the Tambon. The total mapped forest area amounts to 14,700 ha or 40 per cent of the Tambon, but as only 23,800 ha of the Tambon have actually been mapped, the fact that 65 per cent of it is conservation forest is more signiﬁcant. According to my own calculations the area cultivated each year has increased from 100 ha (1.3 per cent) in 1995 to 700 ha (9.2 per cent) in 1997, a rather sharp increase that needs to be monitored. Aggregated data has a relatively high level of inaccuracy, but the most important priority for government agencies is the relation between conservation forest and upland area. Extrapolated to national level the area under conservation forest by far exceeds the national target of 25 per cent protected forests set by the RFD, but does not meet the watershed classiﬁcation ﬁgure of 80 per cent protected forest. The point remains whether one has to accept that people need land to sustain a livelihood, rather than sticking to rigid forest targets. The method of aggregation of digitized land use maps at village level is to be seen as a possible new approach to land use monitoring, in spite of the

Figure 9.4 Land use map of Tambon Huai Poo Ling.

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inherent imperfections and inaccuracies. Aggregated data has a relatively high level of inaccuracy, but while the most important priority for government agencies, namely the relation between conservation forest and upland area, does not change, the range of application of this method remains limited. At least for Huai Poo Ling the method has shown that the forest cover remains high with the Karen rotational shifting cultivation system, while only a small area is burned and cultivated every year. Even though these inaccuracies are prevalent, it is possible to aggregate handdrawn village maps through digitization and this method may become more widely used if the government changes its restrictive approach to a more participatory one.

An assessment of participatory mapping Problems in planning A useful starting point for the assessment land use planning, which aims to strike a balance between a rational technical approach of resource valuation and a social basis for conﬂict resolution, are the two key conditions that must be met for planning to be useful (FAO 1993: 1): 1 2

The need for changes in land use must be accepted by the people involved; There must be the political will to put the plan into effect.

The combination of topographic models with GIS tools brought to light several unresolved issues, which need to be considered in terms of stakeholder priorities as well as their potential to resolve controversial or even contradictory policies. The assessment therefore looks at the potential of the various tools at village and Tambon level separately, yet the following questions are pertinent: • • • •

•

Who should update land use maps? To what extent is this a participatory process? Does land use mapping lead to unfavourable scenarios for concerned communities (i.e. land conﬁscation for reforestation)? Is a legal framework necessary for the application of the proposed planning methodology to be used for scaling up land use planning at Tambon level? To what extent can such mapping overcome the communication gap between stakeholders?

Reviews of the CLM approach pointed out problems of farmers’ adoption of the approach and difﬁculties encountered by the Land Use Planning Teams (Anonymous 1998, vol. 1: 33). Villagers were seeking to

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achieve lands use rights, opposed the outer user boundary and felt insufﬁcient attention was paid to their traditional land use categories, while the Land Use Planning Teams operation was hindered by top-down attitudes of ofﬁcials and the absence of RFD staff. At the time the research project started, Land Use Planning Teams had ceased to exist. The CLM approach concentrated more on the modiﬁcation of traditional agriculture towards ‘improved’ land use, using soil and water conservation measures, as well as on forest restoration. Although the participatory nature of the approach may be questioned, it reﬂected the position of the project as a mediator between farmers and government agencies. The choice of different villages, each with speciﬁc characteristics with regards to the agricultural system, the proximity to a national park, the effects of the CLM approach, the government classiﬁcation in terms of permanence, the village registration status and the clariﬁcation of boundaries has yielded a wide range of problems and local ways to circumvent or resolve them. The hybrid research approach that linked local situations with the policy environment enabled an exposure of the diversity of issues. In this sense the research rather led to a problem identiﬁcation instead of a problem resolution, yet as planning is a political process, it is important to ﬁrst determine the problems before they can be overcome. As a result of project intervention as well as the debate on community forestry, a number of hill tribe networks at village and watershed level have emerged with either mixed ethnic membership ( Jantakad 1998) or purely Karen depending on settlement patterns. A collateral consequence has been the inclusion of hill tribes in people’s movements like the Northern Farmers Network in 1995 and the Assembly of the Poor in 1997, and at national level a Karen village elder has even become a member of the highest planning commission (Odochao 2001: 11). These encouraging developments already necessitate the provision of land use maps for documentation and planning, hence the step from large and heavy topographic models to digitized maps as a complementary planning tool is becoming more realistic. Differences between Thai and Karen terminologies As highland development projects started to apply various land use planning approaches that included varying extents of local participation, this meant a fundamental change for the Karen with their traditional forms of land tenure and communal forest management. From the beginning the Thai language was used in all extension campaigns, so the Karen not only had to become familiar with the northern Thai terminology for types of land, but also had to change their traditional perceptions to match the new language that was used for all ofﬁcial demarcations. All the topographic models and village maps use the Thai terminology, and categories either had to adapt to this classiﬁcation or disappear.

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The notion of common land still persists and includes swidden land, animal grazing grounds, watershed areas and forest areas for hunting and gathering of forest products. The Karen even have a sophisticated terminology for swidden land (ker) depending on the length of fallow, ranging from 1–2 fallow years (chakee) to 3–4 fallow years (chakee ber), then 5–6 fallow years (chakee yo plo) and for more than 7 fallow years (doo law). However, for ofﬁcial planning purposes only the cultivation year is marked on maps, and all swidden ﬁelds are labelled thi rai, a term that traditionally designated ﬁeld crops in northern Thailand. The area inside the outer user boundary is called village area (khet muban) and in Thai implies the entire extent of the village, including all agricultural areas. The fact that villagers may have land beyond these boundaries is rejected for ofﬁcial planning purposes, since DOLA draws an outer village boundary that is the ofﬁcial one. By displaying the contrast between villagers’ own demarcations and the DOLA boundary graphically, villagers could see the discrepancies for the ﬁrst time. The situation for forest types and their categorization is more complex, as the Karen have a highly sophisticated terminology for forest types based on location, proximity to water and type of water source, hilltop forests and holy grounds. The diversity of forest categories is not reﬂected in the ofﬁcial Thai terminology, which has a term for conservation forest in general (pa anurak) and one for forest reserves (pa raksa), though to the Karen they both indicate the same kind of land. A term that creates some confusion is the northern Thai term for watershed forest (pa ton nam), for it is not included in the ofﬁcial RFD terminology and thus does not appear on land demarcations. Karen villages demarcate all this area as conservation forest. The term for communal woodland or multipurpose forest (pa chai soi ) is clearly understood by all villages, as it corresponds more to their own notion of forest areas for wood and other product extraction. The loss of traditions in land use may be lamentable, yet on the realistic side it is a process that is unavoidable as the Karen are increasingly exposed to government agencies, and their own farming systems are gradually changing towards permanent agriculture. In this sense it may be an advantage if the Karen familiarize themselves with the Thai terminology, as it increases their abilities to negotiate with government authorities on planning. Village level concerns The issue of local concerns has been considered to the extent that each village as a whole agreed on the land categorization and boundary outlining, which for planning purposes is a step forward from rough sketch mapping without scale and geographic references. On the other hand, updating digitized maps is beyond the control of villagers and requires the involvement of planning agencies and regular consultation. However, for ﬁelds located outside the boundary, Karen villagers have become resigned

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to the fact that these will eventually be lost. The inclusion of the boundary drawn by DOLA for village registration purposes attracted substantial attention, because none of the villagers had ever received any map showing it. Once the boundary had been added to the drawing their fears of losing land increased. In addition, the population will grow and new villages will be formed, so taking land from the old villages to allocate it to new ones will continue. It would be important to have a standard transparent procedure that considers the land demarcations of the respective villages, but to date such procedure does not exist, leaving room for conﬂict. There are various shortcomings on the government side. RFD refuses to recognize the land delineations done by villagers and keeps on conﬁscating land; and DOLA does not consider community-deﬁned boundaries when registering villages. This situation undermines the purpose of participatory planning and land demarcation, for there are no concrete policy guidelines towards which the process can be oriented. This also applies to the access of hill tribes to decision-making power and public knowledge, as the ownership of data has shifted in favour of outside agencies. Mapping revealed the extent of land use, which has led – in some cases – to land conﬁscation by the Royal Forest Department and the provincial Governor. Such interventions are not backed up by policy other than the restrictive watershed classiﬁcation. The persistent threat of land conﬁscation, though justiﬁed when there is encroachment into demarcated conservation forest areas, inhibits farmers’ long-term planning. This also refers to one of the two preconditions set by FAO for planning to be useful, namely the political will to put plans into effect. This precondition appears to be lacking as of the writing of this chapter. Tambon level concerns The same local concerns apply at Tambon level with questions of whether it would not be better to stick to topographic models only. One reason why it is so important for villagers to demarcate outer user boundaries at Tambon level is related to the hope of recognized land rights or titles, which in the early days of CLM had been expressed individually (Anonymous 1998, vol. 1: 46). Now that these villages are registered and village leaders are members of the Tambon Administrative Organizations (TAO), they reiterate their hope to obtain land rights at communal level. There is a risk of TAOs replacing traditional village networks, yet at the same time membership of TAOs also guarantees the same constitutional rights to development as for Thais, and as it is an ofﬁcial government administrative level, it will be more difﬁcult for central agencies to ignore requests and agreements made during meetings. TAOs already formulate annual and ﬁve-year development plans that include natural resource management issues, so villagers can persistently voice their concerns and needs for support in sustaining a livelihood from agriculture.

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The TAO act was a big step forward in including registered hill tribe villages in the Thai administration, and the second Master plan for Highland Development supports that. However, as long as the RFD and the DLD are not represented at TAOs, there will be no joint planning with common goal and priorities, as most of the area is still protected forest under RFD mandate. The absence of this key agency at Tambon and district level needs to be perceived as an inconsistency linked to the highly political nature of forest management (Ganjanapan 1998: 73).

Conclusion The clearest conclusion that can be drawn from the research is that land use planning needs a political foundation so as to bring the various stakeholders together to agree on compromises acceptable by all parties, particularly in times of population increases and parallel resource decrease. Land use planning and natural resource management have come a long way in the highlands of Thailand, and after the withdrawal of most bilateral highland development programmes, the future lies in the hands of the primary stakeholders themselves. For the Karen farmers this meant a total change in livelihood practices, agriculture and more recently the integration into Thai administration. When dealing with outside agencies, the most common form of data display is still land use mapping, though the use of three-dimensional topographic models is more transparent to villagers than two-dimensional maps. Within the geographical scope of this study a number of practical difﬁculties emerged in relation to boundary deﬁnitions, exclusion of land beyond these boundaries and agreement by the RFD once the Karen were called upon using topographic models and digitized maps without external support. Such tools are only useful if clear goals are set and allow for communal forest management by villagers, which after more than a decade of political debate is still an elusive prospect. The policy framework needs to be reformed to ﬁnd a compromise between forest protection and agricultural subsistence, and to create a link between national priorities and applications at village and Tambon level. Agreements between villages and government agencies can be made by local TAOs with their mandate for natural resource management. A notable positive example has been set by the non-governmental organization CARE in Mae Chaem district of Chiang Mai, which has worked with 3-D models and digitized land use maps in combination with written land use agreements signed by village leaders and government representatives in specially created watershed committees (Srimongkontip 2000). The success hinges on the long-term commitment of CARE, combined with the integration of village land use classiﬁcations and key government agencies as members of these watershed committees, which seems to have created a relatively stable platform for land use planning. This is still of an

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informal nature and is the only known case in Thailand that has reached that far, yet it should serve as an encouragement that the above approach is gradually becoming more widespread as the Karen are struggling to secure their livelihoods. The process of participatory land use planning in forest areas still lacks a legal policy basis with the refusal by the RFD to modify the restrictive watershed classiﬁcation, as well as the political stalemate over the community forestry act. In the long run growing people’s movements like the Forum of the Poor will place increasing pressure on the government to pass and implement laws in favour of involving local people in natural resource management.

Note 1 The author is grateful to the Tropical Ecology Support Programme of GTZ for funding the research.

Afterword The politics of ‘Karen-ness’ in Thailand Charles F. Keyes

Introduction The contributions to this volume explore how peoples speaking related Karennic languages who live in Thailand have been construed as being ‘Karen’ (Thai, Kariang).1 There is no common cultural denominator to all those labelled ‘Karen’, neither in the past nor the present, neither in Thailand nor in Burma where a much larger population of Karennicspeaking people live. The Karen are an invention of the modern world, a product of Christian missionization, colonial and postcolonial ethnographic research, and policies regarding ethnic minorities adopted by the governments of independent Burma and Thailand. Although the invention of Karen as an ethnic group in Burma has inﬂuenced how Karennicspeaking peoples have been construed as an ethnic group in Thailand, the ethnic status of these peoples is not the same as the Karen in Burma. As the contributions to this book, as well as other research demonstrates, there have been distinctive processes that have shaped the politics of ‘Karen-ness’ in Thailand. Delang, in his chapter, stresses how the peoples speaking Sgaw Karen dialects among whom he lived in Bo Kaeo Commune, Samoeng District, Chiang Mai Province in northern Thailand understand themselves as peoples of a particular place, their indigenousness being rooted in their attachment to the land where their ancestors lived and where they engage in multi-stranded relations with other people of the same place. Fink shows in her paper how the Pwo Karen among whom she lived being ‘fearful of communities beyond plong rekang, or Pwo Karen territory’ continue ‘to take pride in most of their distinctive practices, including their courting rituals’. Mischung shows how the inhabitants of another Sgaw Karen-speaking village on Doi (Mount) Inthanon in Chom Thong District, Chiang Mai Province retain their links to their ancestors through recitation of hta, verses, that are ‘regarded as the authentic speech of the remote “ancestors of the olden days”. This sense of rooted-ness in place is characteristic not only of peoples like the Pga K’nyau – as those speaking Sgaw Karennic dialects call themselves – or Plong (Pwo Karen) but also of

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almost all peoples in rural communities in Thailand, Burma, and elsewhere in Asia at least until quite recently.2 Those who have been identiﬁed or today identify as Pga K’nyau (Sgaw/S’gaw) or Plong (Pwo/P’wo) or other names that have been subsumed by linguists under the rubric of Karen3 have always been aware of living near other peoples who are not the same as they are – who do not, in other words, share the same ancestors. Prior to the early nineteenth century some Karennic-speaking peoples linked themselves to the larger worlds of the dominant societies through adoption of the Buddhist traditions of the neighbouring Mon, Burmans, or Shan. In doing so, many substituted a genealogical link to the Buddha for their links with their ancestors.4 While adoption of the Buddhist traditions of their neighbours must have resulted in their complete assimilation of some to these neighbouring cultures, others like the Pa-o or Taungthu, in the Shan State and Kayah living in the interstices between the Shan, Burman, and Lanna Thai (northern Thai) worlds remained distinctive because they combined the borrowed Buddhist traditions with their indigenous ones. From the point of view of the dominant Buddhist Burman, Mon, or Tai peoples, the non-Buddhist Karen were unbelievers, and thus uncivilized. The Tai term kha, as Renard shows in his chapter, applied to such peoples was adopted apparently by Burmans and Mon as well as Tai-speaking peoples and linked with another term, variously pronounced riang or yang and applied ‘to various groups of forest people living around lowland tai groups and speaking dialects either of what linguists call Karennic or Waic languages in the Mon-Khmer language family’. In other words, in the premodern period speakers of Karennic languages who were not Buddhist were subsumed with speakers of other languages in a general category of forest-dwelling pagans (in Tai languages, khon pa). More precisely, as Marlowe had argued, because most Karennic-speaking peoples lived in relative close proximity to lowland societies they were conceived of as ‘holders of the “wild” for the “sown” . . . , the “marchmen” of the civilized who hold the hills as part of the dominion of the valley’ (Marlowe 1979: 196). Beginning in the early nineteenth century the local worlds of Karennicspeaking peoples began to be penetrated in signiﬁcant ways by new outside inﬂuences and such penetration intensiﬁed throughout the twentieth century. These exogenous inﬂuences have resulted in the transformation of many Karennic-speaking peoples ﬁrst in Burma and then in Thailand into ethnic minorities under the rubric of ‘Karen’.

Christianity and the invention of the Karen in Burma Christianity can be said to have created ‘Karen’ identity in Burma. As Victor Lieberman (1978: 469) notes, ‘the very category “Karen” was a derogatory invention of the Burmese which was only given respectability

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by Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century.’ The American Baptist mission, which began in Burma in 1813 with the arrival of Andoniram Judson, was more successful in ﬁnding converts among speakers of Karennic languages than among the dominant Burmans. Part of this success, which began with the baptism of Ko Tha Byu in 1828, was facilitated by the equation of some Karen myths and beliefs with Christian ones. Protestant missionaries focused on the similarity between the name of Y’wa, the creator-God for the Karen, and that of the Jewish Yahweh. They gave particular attention to a Karen myth that at the creation they, along with the other peoples of the world, had been given a book – that is, a gift of literacy – but that the book had been destroyed. Although relegated to illiteracy, the myth also posited that one day outsiders would bring a ‘golden book’ to them.5 The Protestant missionaries presented themselves as the carriers of the ‘golden book’ which they equated with the Bible.6 The gift of the book depended on the practical work of missionaries in translating the Bible into Karen languages for which there was no prior system of writing. In the early 1830s two American Baptist missionaries developed an orthography for a Sgaw Karen dialect based on Burmese writing. A printing press was set up at Tavoy in 1837 and by 1853 the entire Bible was published in Sgaw Karen, as well as primers, readers, textbooks etc. The sum of printed pages added up to about 20 million, in Sgaw Karen only – all within 25 years of the baptism of Ko Tha Byu. Translation work into Pwo Karen met with some technical difﬁculties, but the New Testament was translated by 1852 and the entire Pwo Karen Bible was completed in 1878. (Hovemyr 1989: 98) Together with producing a new Christian literature in Karen language, the missionaries also promoted education for Karen through the establishment of schools. These schools were the crucible for an emergent sense of Karen-ness that transcended local communities. Many literate Karen, particularly those who held supra-village roles in church organizations, education, and publishing, began to identify as ‘Karen’ rather than as people of local communities. In 1881 a Karen National Association was created by such people to promote ‘pan-Karen aspirations’ (Hovemyr 1989: 89). Those who espoused this emergent nationalism allied themselves with the British who had conquered lower Burma in 1824–1826, central Burma in 1852, and ﬁnally upper Burma in 1885. Christian Karen were no longer the uncivilized forest-dwellers that Burmans, as well as Mon and Tai, had viewed non-Buddhist Karennicspeaking peoples prior to the nineteenth century. Those Christian Karen

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who followed their missionary leaders in joining British efforts in 1887 to repress a last stand of Burman resisters led by monks by capturing and even beheading the monks laid the foundation for future ethnic conﬂict between the Karen and Burmans.7 During their rule of Burma from 1886–1942, the British accorded Christian Karen special favour, including recruiting many for the police and military forces used to control the country. As a consequence, an increasing division between Christian Karen and Burmans developed. After Japanese forces defeated the British in 1942, the Japanese and the puppet regime they installed fostered reprisals against the Karen (see Guyot 1976, 1978). The British did little to ensure that Karen nationalist interests were taken into account in the brief period between the defeat of the Japanese in 1945 and the granting of independence to Burma in 1948. Even though the number of Karennic-speaking people who were Buddhist or continued to follow local traditions was considerably greater at the time of Burmese independence than the number of Christian Karen,8 ‘Karen-ness’ in Burma has been promoted most strongly by Christian Karen. The ethnonym ‘Karen’ has come to be linked in the politics of ethnicity in Burma primarily with the Christian-led Karen ethnonationalist movements that have been in rebellion against the Burmese state since its founding in 1948.9 While an examination of ‘Karen rebellion(s)’ in Burma is beyond the scope of this book, Karen ethnonationalism in Burma has been signiﬁcant in the development of discourses about Karennic-speaking peoples who are indigenous to Thailand.

Karen as an ethnic minority in Thailand The emergence of a Christian-led Karen ethnonationalism in Burma had little inﬂuence on the way in which Karennic-speaking people were situated in Thailand until the 1960s. Karennic-speaking people had ﬁgured very little in the thoughts of the Siamese, the dominant Tai-speaking people of central Thailand, and the Yuan, the dominant Tai people of northern Thailand until wars between Tai and Burman empires in the late eighteenth century (see Keyes 1979c: 31ff ). From 1767, when Burmese troops conquered the Siamese capital of Ayutthaya, until 1885 when the British ﬁnished the conquest of Burma, the frontier between the Tai and Burman worlds where Karennic-speaking people lived was of signiﬁcant attention by the Siamese and Yuan states. Pinkaew, in her chapter above, notes how in the period of the mid-nineteenth century the Siamese court recognized some local Pwo Karen chiefs in Western Siam as vassals (cao müang). But after the border between Siam and British Burma was ﬁxed in the late nineteenth century and particularly after the Siamese court in 1892 instituted an administrative reorganization by which all vassal rulers were replaced by ofﬁcials appointed by the central government, Karennic-speaking people ceased to be of interest to the Siamese state for over a half century.

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Some local Karennic-speaking people in western and northern Thailand began to be aware during this period of radical changes in the world in which they lived as a consequence of their subordination to the new administrative system instituted by the Thai state. The system of compulsory primary education instituted by the Bangkok government in the decades prior to World War II also resulted in some Karennic-speaking people attending Thai schools. From the latter part of the nineteenth century on, a small number of Karen Christian evangelists from Burma came to Thailand to attempt to win converts there among Karennic-speaking peoples. While the number who converted was very few prior to the 1960s, these evangelists made some Karennic-peoples aware of the emergence of a wider Karen Christian identity in Burma (Hovemyr 1989: Chapter 4). More inﬂuential than the Christian evangelists during this period were several Karen and Thai men who attracted large followings among the Karen because of their Buddhist-based charisma (see Stern 1968 and Hinton 1979; also see McKinnon above). Those who joined such movements were reacting in a similar way to many other local peoples in Siam in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century who had been attracted to Buddhist millenarian movements because of a crisis of political order which had been precipitated by the restructuring of the Siamese realm (see Keyes 1971, 1977). Most Karennic-speaking peoples in Thailand continued, however, to live in worlds shaped by ancestral ways and by their adaptation to local environments. Neither the Thai state nor the Karennic-speaking peoples themselves began to think of Karennic-peoples as being ethnically ‘Karen’ until the 1960s. The beginnings of what Buergin in his chapter refers to as the ethnicist turn in Thai policies towards Karennic-speaking people was in the late 1950s when the Thai government felt compelled by international pressures to impose a ban on the production of opium poppies. Following this, the government sponsored research to ascertain who were living in the hill areas of northern Thailand where such poppies were being produced. As Pinkaew Laungaramsri (1996b; also see her Chapter 2) has shown Karennic-speaking peoples living in the highland were subsumed within a category of chao khao ‘hill tribes’ that perpetuated the premodern construal of such people as chao pa, ‘wild’ or ‘forest’ people. Inclusion in the category of chao khao meant that Karennic-speaking peoples were considered to be a problem (panha) or threat (kankhomkhu) to the Thai nation-state. The primary basis for such a construal derived from the fact that most in this category practised swidden cultivation. Even when swiddeners – as was the case of almost all Karennic-speaking peoples – did not cultivate opium poppies, swiddening was a problem because it was deemed to be destructive of forests and watersheds. Buergin in his chapter writes that ofﬁcial ‘discourse refers to the image of the “hill tribes” as destroyers of the nation’s watershed forests as well as the cultural

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framing of Thai-ness as incompatible with residence in watershed forests and swiddening.’ The stigmatization of Karennic-speaking peoples as chao khao also derived from the perpetuation of premodern ideas of such peoples as uncivilized. This was based on a perception – that was only partially true in the case of Karennic-speaking peoples – that chao khao continue to follow non-Buddhist local religious traditions. The conversion of an increasing number of Karennic-speaking peoples to Christianity only reinforced the idea that they could never be real ‘Thai’ (see Hayami 1992 and Keyes 1993). After the coup by General Ne Win in Burma in 1962 some American Baptist missionaries who had worked among Karen in Burma moved to Thailand where they focused their attention on trying to convert Karennic-speaking people. While the Thai government permitted the missionaries to come, their success in fostering a Christianity among Karen in Thailand that utilized the writing systems developed in Burma raised suspicions among some in the Thai government that Karen in Thailand would also join a separatist movement. As increasing numbers of Karen from Burma ﬂed to Thailand after the Burmese government intensiﬁed efforts to defeat the Karen rebels, the Thai press as well as the government raised doubts about whether Karen in Thailand could be good Thai citizens. Many Karennic-speaking peoples who are descendants of indigenous peoples living within the borders of Thailand have not been able to acquire citizenship and, like an even larger number of other chao khao, are denied the rights accorded to all other peoples with roots in local communities. The tendency to consider Karennic-speaking peoples as not really Thai has been reinforced in the recent decades in the minds of many in Thailand by the media attention given to the Burmese Karen refugees who have ﬂed into Thailand from the onslaught of Burmese military campaigns. The problematic status of Karen in Thailand is evident in the popular and award-winning ﬁlm ‘Salween’ (also known in Thai as ‘Müpün 2’, Gunman 2), produced by Thailand’s foremost ﬁlm director, Prince Chatri Chalerm Yukol in 1993. This action ﬁlm depicts the violence associated with efforts of Thai border patrol police to prevent supporters of the Burmese Karen independence movement from ﬂeeing across the border when they are attacked by Burmese forces. Their efforts are complicated by the alliance with these forces of a corrupt Thai businessman and his son engaged in importing illegal timber from Burma. The main character of the ﬁlm is a Thai border patrol policeman of Karen origin whose ‘hill Karen’ wife was murdered by the businessman. He ﬁnds himself in mortal combat with a Burmese Karen who is an ofﬁcer in the Karen national army who feels compelled to assist the businessman’s son who has murdered his own wife and has ﬂed to the Karen-controlled area in Burma. Both die in the end. While the movie provides a positive image of the assimilated Thai Karen border patrol policeman, it also portrays the Burmese Karen as the ‘real’ Karen.

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In the 1960s when Karennic-speaking peoples were ﬁrst subsumed into the stigmatized chao khao category, most Karennic-speaking peoples were still living in the local worlds of their ancestors. By the last decades of the twentieth century, however, the Thai government no longer had hegemonic control over the discourse about Karennic-speaking peoples in the country. An increasing number of Karennic-speaking people with deep roots in Thailand have begun to contest their stigmatized identity as chao khao and to embrace an alternative identity as (Thai) Karen. The changes have come about in part because such Thai institutions as schools have been successfully established in many local communities. It is now only in a dwindling number of villages still located in relative remote hill areas that bilingualism and literacy in Thai is rare. There is also an increasing number of Karen who go on to higher education. As Hayami observes, since the 1980s even a signiﬁcant number of Karen women have left their local communities and moved to towns temporarily or permanently. Change has also come because of the spread of radio and television to Karen villages. Outside inﬂuences also have been introduced by the large number of tourist trekkers who visit Karen villages each year. Of particular signiﬁcance has been conversion of an increasing number of Karen to Thai Buddhism. Statistics derived from Hilltribe Welfare and Development Center of Thailand and posted on a Christian missionary website show that in 1998 55 per cent of more than 300,000 Thai Karen were identiﬁed as being Buddhist and another 17 per cent were both Buddhist and animist. Only 18 per cent were identiﬁed as Christian.10 Even Christian Karen today are oriented towards Thai identity through their membership in the Church of Christ in Thailand. Finally, Thai Karen identity has also been reinforced by its positive valorization by a number of Thai non-governmental organizations who have subsumed Karen in the larger movements to promote the rights of local peoples in Thailand to sufﬁcient resources to ensure sustainable life styles. McKinnon and Pinkaew both discuss the signiﬁcant roles that Karennic-speaking peoples play in such NGOs as the Inter Mountain People’s Education and Culture in Thailand Association (IMPECT). Many of the chapters in this book examine how Thai Karen are engaged in proactive efforts vis-à-vis some agencies of the Thai state to be recognized as capable of managing natural resources in sustainable ways. In doing so, they seek not to defend traditional practices but to draw on their traditions in situating themselves within the modern political economy of Thailand.11 As Puginier observes in Chapter 9: The loss of traditions in land use may be lamentable, yet on the realistic side it is a process that is unavoidable as the Karen are increasingly exposed to government agencies, and their own farming systems are gradually changing towards permanent agriculture. In this sense it may be an advantage if the Karen familiarise themselves with the Thai

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terminology, as it increases their abilities to negotiate with government authorities on planning. As Puginier and Pinkaew show, Karen claims to competence to manage natural resources in a sustainable way draws as much from modern technological knowledge adapted to local situations as from traditional practices. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, the ethnic status of Karennic-speaking peoples in Thailand – that is, ‘Karen-ness’ in Thailand – has not been determined by the Thai state alone nor even by those across the border who seek to establish a separate Karen nation-state. Karennic-speaking peoples in Thailand are seeking to be recognized as people whose rootedness in particular localities with distinctive cultural and linguistic practices together with their competence to situate themselves in sophisticated ways within a Thai world makes them Thai Karen rather than stigmatized chao khao or disloyal citizens because of links with Karen ethnonationalism in Burma.

Notes 1 In Northern Thailand the ethnonym Yang is still also used. 2 Many Tai-speaking peoples in Thailand and elsewhere, for example, refer to themselves as Khon Phünmüang, literally ‘peoples of the locality’. 3 The website of the Summer Institute of Linguistics – (⬍http://www.ethnologue.com⬎) – lists ﬁfteen different names under ‘Karen’, as well as a separate listing for Kayah. Cheesman (2002: 203) notes that estimates place the total number of distinct Karennic dialects at 20–25. In Thailand the languages spoken by the vast majority of Karennic-speaking people have been classiﬁed by linguists as being either Sgaw or Pwo. There is also a small number of Kayah-speaking people in the far northwest of the country. 4 On the establishment by Southeast Asian peoples of genealogical connections to the Buddha, see Keyes (1995). There is no good estimate of the proportion of Karennic-speaking peoples on the eve of the colonial transformation who were adherents of Buddhism, but given that large numbers of Karennicspeaking peoples – one-third to one-half – in the late twentieth century were Buddhists, it is highly likely that a very signiﬁcant percentage of Karennicspeaking peoples were Buddhist in the premodern period. 5 A myth of the loss of literacy is widely found among upland-dwelling peoples in mainland Southeast Asia and southern China. Judith Pine (2002), in her dissertation on literacy among the Lahu, has discussed these myths at some length. 6 Catholic missionaries also began to work among Karennic-speaking people in the nineteenth century, but Protestant missionization was the primary catalyst for the emergence of Karen nationalism. 7 The involvement of Christian Karen in the suppression of the monk-led rebellion was described by ABM missionaries in the Baptist Missionary Magazine of 1886 (see Gravers 1993: 23–24). 8 The percentage of Christian among Karennic-speaking people in Burma increased steadily until World War I and then appears to have remained more or less constant since then at about 30 per cent of those speaking Sgaw and

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Pwo dialects. Smith (1991: 44) estimates that in the late twentieth century ‘perhaps only one sixth of all Karens are Christian’. 9 The best sources for an understanding of Karen ethnonationalism in Burma include Cheesman (2002); Christie (2000); Smith (1991, 1995, 1999); Lintner (1999); Brown (1988, 1994); Sheppard (1997); Falla (1991); Rajah (1990); and Silverstein (1987). 10 The data are from Mekong Information, ⬍http://www.infomekong. com/p_group_sgawkaren_1.htm⬎ (last accessed on 10 February 2003). On Buddhist missionization among the Thai Karen, see Keyes (1971) and Hayami (1992, 1996). 11 Walker has created a strawman – which he labels the ‘Karen consensus’ – which he accuses of promoting a ‘primordialist’ ‘commitment to Karen culture as an intrinsic property of a deﬁned, and deﬁnable, group of people’ (Walker 2001: 160). As the contributions to this volume clearly demonstrate, no such ‘Karen consensus’ exists.

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Toyota, Mika (1996) ‘Kanko to sei’ (Tourism and sexuality: northern Thai hills and the image of women), in Yamashita, Shinji (ed.) Kanko-Jinruigaku (Anthropology of Tourism), Tokyo: Shin-yo-sha: 131–140. TRC (Tribal Research Center) (1978) ‘Distribution of major highland ethnic group village settlements’, map, cartographer: Manus Maneeprasert, Chiang Mai: Tribal Research Center. Turton, Andrew (ed.) (2000) Civility and Savagery. Social Identity in Tai States, Richmond: Curzon Press. Uhlig, Harald (1980) ‘Problems of land use and recent settlement in Thailand’s highland-lowland transition zone’, in Ives, Jack D., Sanga Sabhasri and Pisit Voraurai (eds) Conservation and Development in Northern Thailand, Tokyo: The United Nations University: 33–42. Uhlig, Harald and Riethmuller, Robert (eds) (1984) Spontaneous and Planned Settlement in Southeast Asia: Forest Clearing and Recent Pioneer Colonization in the ASEAN Countries and Two Case-Studies on Thailand, Hamburg: Institute of Asian Affairs. Vatikiotis, Michael (1984) ‘Ethnic pluralism in the northern Thai city of ChiangMai’, unpublished PhD thesis, Oxford: University of Oxford. Vienne, Bernard (1989) ‘Facing development in highlands: a challenge for Thai society,’ in McKinnon, John and Vienne, Bernard (eds) Hill Tribes Today: Problems in Change, Bangkok: White Lotus-Ostrom: 33–60. Vandergeest, Peter (1996a) ‘Mapping nature: territorialization of forest rights in Thailand’, Society and Natural Resources, 9: 159–175. —— (1996b) ‘Property rights in protected areas: obstacles to community involvement as a solution in Thailand’, Environmental Conservation, 23: 259–268. Vithoon Pungprasert (1989) ‘Hill tribe people blamed for deforestation’, in McKinnon, John and Vienne, Bernard (eds) Hill Tribes Today, Bangkok: White Lotus Orstom: 363–368. Walker, Andrew (1999) ‘Karen economy and rural nostalgia in an age of uncertainty: reﬂections from Northern Thailand’, Paper prepared for the 7th International Conference on Thai Studies, Amsterdam, 4–8 July, University of Amsterdam. —— (2001) ‘The “Karen consensus”, ethnic politics and resource-use legitimacy in Northern Thailand’, Asian Ethnicity, 2: 145–162. Wanat Bhruksasri (1989) ‘Problem solving through understanding: a personal opinion on how to approach development problems in the highlands’, in McKinnon, John and Vienne, Bernard (eds) Hill Tribes Today: Problems in Change, Bangkok: White Lotus-Orstom: 227–248. Waralak Itthi-pon-o-lan (1998) ‘Rotational shifting cultivation: a case study of Mae Lan Kham village, Mu 6, Samoeng Tai Tambon, Samoeng District, Chiang Mai’, in Thai-German Highland Development Programme, Community Based Natural Resource Management Experiences in Upland and Highland Areas, Chiang Mai: ThaiGerman Highland Development Programme. Waranoot Tungittiplakorn (1995) ‘Highland-lowland conﬂict over natural resources: a case of Mae Soi, Chiang Mai, Thailand’, Society and Natural Resources, 8: 279–288. Watershed (1997) ‘Ethnicity and resources’, Watershed, 3, 1. —— (1998) ‘Conﬂict or resolution? People and forests in Northern Thailand’, Watershed, 4, 1: 10–28. —— (2001) ‘This is like dying while still alive’, Watershed, 6, 2: 43–47.

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Periodicals and newspapers Bangkok Post. Decade. Journal of the Siam Society. Krungthep Thurakit. Muang Boran. Thairath. The Nation.

Index

Agnew, John A. 161t agriculture: agricultural cycle 99–101; animal husbandry 34–5, 158; Ban Huai Hoi 67, 68; Bo Kaeo 173–4, 174t, 175, 181–2 n11; ﬁshing 47; land use 155–6, 155f, 170, 170t, 172–73, 172f, 174, 174t, 175, 175f ; Mae Kha Pu 170, 170t, 171, 172–3, 172f, 181 n7; rotation system 37, 38, 46–7; shifting cultivation 52, 184; subsistence 46, 58, 157–9, 167, 170, 170t ; swidden 23, 32, 46, 48, 52, 99, 157, 164, 184–5, 205–6, 214; Thung Yai Naresuan 46–7; Ti Kree Say 99–101; zoning system 37, 49; see also cash crops; opium; rice Akha 30, 32, 51, 52, 183, 184f, 185 American Baptist Mission 1, 2, 11, 112, 212, 215, 217 n7 Anan Ganjanapan 81, 83 n3, 185 animism 64, 216; ‘au’ ma xae ritual 119, 120, 164, 181 n4; common good 105, 106, 117, 167; death 95–6; marriage 102, 104, 105–7; matrilineage 106, 107, 164; spirits 104, 105, 106, 107, 111 n13, 111 n16, 165 Apichatvullop, Y. 189 Assembly of the Poor 70, 71, 205 Bakan, David 161t Baker, C. 156 Baker, Captain George 1, 112 Ban Huai Hoi, Mae Wang 66–72, 74–6, 78–83 Ban Mae Haw, Mae Sariang 31 Bangkok Post 33, 36, 37, 56, 62 n3, 62 n6, 71, 74–5, 76, 183, 193 Bartsch, Henry 70 Batoo 134

Bellah, Robert Neelly 161t Benedict, Paul 7 Benjamin, Geoffrey 161t, 162–3, 166 B’ghwe 23 birth control 178–80, 182 n12–13 Bishop, Ryan 113 Black Karen 2, 8 Bo Kaeo, Samoeng 159, 165, 168, 169, 171, 173–6, 180; see also Mae Kha Pu Boardman, George Dana 2–3 Border Patrol Police (BPP) 29, 30, 33, 46, 215 borders 26–7, 31, 32–3, 39, 46, 155, 213 Borthwick, Prue 76 Bradley, Dan 28 Buddhism 8, 33, 71, 211, 213, 214, 216, 217 n4 Burma Ministry of Home and Religious Affairs 8 Burma (Myanmar): British administration 26, 155, 213; Christianity 6, 211–13, 217 n7, 217–18 n8; dyadic speech 131; ethnic minorities 8–9, 39; Japanese in 213; Karen identity 14, 210, 211–13; Karen independence movement 213, 215; Karen life 2–4, 7–8, 110 n8; Karen terminology 1–2; Ne Win government 215; population 8 Burma Socialist Programme Party 7, 8 CARE, Mae Chaem district 208–9 cash crops 55–6, 58, 66, 156, 157–8, 169, 170, 170t, 171–2, 173, 177–9, 181 n8 Central Hill Tribe Committe (CHTC) 29 Chang Noi 37–8 chao khao see hill tribes

238

Index

chao pa 22, 28, 51, 54 Chapman, E.C. 186t Chatri Chalerm Yukol, Prince 215 Cheesman, Nick 217 n3 Chiang Mai University 71, 72, 196 Chiang Rai province 194 children 91–2, 94, 107, 110 n5, 111 n16, 179, 180f, 182 n13 Chom Thong Conﬂict 56, 183 Chotichaipiboon, T. 187 Christianity: Bible 212; in Burma 6, 211–13, 217 n7, 217–18 n8; Karen evangelists 214; Pwo Karen 11, 12, 212; Sgaw Karen 11, 12, 14 n5; in Thailand 12, 67, 108, 120–1, 126, 148, 169, 214, 215, 216, 218 n10 Chulalongkorn, King 9, 11, 14 n7, 46 civil rights 50, 83 n3, 189, 215 CLM see Community Based Land Use Planning and Local Watershed Management communication 59, 90, 164, 168, 169, 181 n3; language 59, 66, 69, 70, 90; see also hta; roads communist insurgency 32, 33–4, 39–40, 41 n5, 41 n9, 55, 189 Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) 33, 65 Communist Suppression Operations Command (CSOC) 33 Community Based Land Use Planning and Local Watershed Management (CLM) 194, 195, 197, 200, 204, 205, 207 community culture 51, 66, 70–2, 74–7, 81–3 Community Forest Bill 56, 191, 194 community rights 51, 59, 61, 187, 188, 191 computer use 78, 79, 80, 82 conservation 48, 49, 50–1, 60, 188; Huai Poo Ling 199, 202; Karen traditions and 13, 35, 37, 38–9, 44–5, 60, 63 n10, 216–17; see also forests courting rituals: and agricultural cycle 99–101; at funerals 95–9, 110 n8; influences on 107–8; love letters 101, 136; and marriage 95, 108–9; at weddings 102, 104; see also love songs CPT see Communist Party of Thailand CSOC see Communist Suppression Operations Command

culture, politicization of 38, 41–2 n10 dams 57, 58 Danpongpee, Esther 12 Decade 37 Department of Land Development (DLD) 193, 194 Department of Local Administration (DOLA) 193, 194, 202, 207 Dhammanaat 36, 37 Diran, Richard K. 8 Dirksen, Hagen 187 divorce 105–6, 122, 129 n4 Doi Dokphin 31 Doi Inthanon National Park 183 Doi Phu Kha National Park 21 DOLA see Department of Local Administration dress 7–8, 10f, 28, 92–4, 97, 107, 110 n3, 129 n1 drug abuse control 41 n5, 187–8, 191, 193 Durkheim, Émile 161t Durrenberger, E. Paul 176 dyadic speech 131–3, 138 economy: Ban Huai Hoi 69; Bo Kaeo 171, 173–6, 180; cash orientation 157–8, 169, 173, 181 n8; equality 168, 176; Mae Kha Pu 170–3, 176, 180; sanctions 167, 169, 171–2, 175, 176; subsistence 46, 58, 157–9, 167, 171, 176, 178, 180; Thailand 48; Thung Yai Naresuan 46–7, 57 education 182 n13; Ban Huai Hoi 67–8, 69; Bo Kaeo 174; citizenship and 83 n3; compulsory 214; Karen in Burma 212; Mae Kha Pu 169, 171; Thai language 216; and urban migration 125, 129 n7 Egerod, Søren 7, 15 n10 Epstein, T.S. 181 n6 equality 168, 176, 179 ethnic classiﬁcation 22, 27–8, 29, 214; see also identity Ewers, Kirsten 11 exogeny 162–3, 169 face, loss of 98, 136, 140, 141 Falla, Jonathan 111 n14 family 94, 110 n5, 112, 120, 129 n2, 163–4; see also birth control; children; marriage

Index Fink, Christina 38, 134 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 48, 204, 207 forests 49f, 53f, 155f ; agricultural use 47, 49, 50; categorization 206; commercial use 48, 50, 51, 188; concession areas 47, 48, 49f, 73; conservation 37–8, 50, 55, 72, 188, 189, 191; deforestation 21, 31, 39–40, 43, 48–9, 49f, 50, 52, 55, 62 n4, 156, 158, 185, 188; intact forest 76–7; policies 47–8, 49, 50, 54, 55, 188–93; protected areas 48, 49, 49f, 50, 51, 52, 53f, 62 n3, 188; reserves 48, 49f, 50, 51, 73, 192–3; settlement 50–1, 62 n5, 62 n7, 188, 189, 192; see also logging industry; Royal Forestry Department; watershed classiﬁcation Fortes, Meyer 161t Forum of the Poor 209 Foucault, Michel 113 Fox, James J. 131–2, 133 Friedman, J. 71, 76 frontier security 22, 24–6 funerals 6, 95–9, 108, 110 n7, 110 n8, 110–11 n10, 135–6 Gellner, Ernest 161t, 166 gender: mobility 122–3, 127; roles 91–2, 94, 109, 111 n13, 122–3; sexual transgressions 118, 121–2 Geographic Information Systems (GIS) 195–6, 204; MIGIS 66, 78–81, 82, 84 n8 Gilmour, D. 188 government policies: drug abuse control 41 n5, 187–8, 191, 193; forests 47–8, 49, 50, 54, 55, 188–93; hill tribes 30–1, 55, 187–93; national development 48, 188; resettlement 185, 188 Graham, W.A. 28 Grierson, George 7 Hafner, J.A. 189 Hallett, Holt S. 34 Hamilton, James W. 95, 112, 165, 181 n2 harmony 37, 38, 39, 136–7 Hayami, Yoko 11, 110 n5 Hek Hong 81 hermits (aethae) 44, 62 n1 Highland Development and Narcotic Crops Control 191

239

highlands xif, 156, 183–4, 184f, 189; administration 191; development programmes 193–4, 205, 207 hill tribes (chao khao) 53f ; assimilation 29, 32; benign/submissive 35, 36–9; development iniatives 31, 193–5; elevation 31, 52, 183, 184f ; identity 30–1, 35, 40; malign/aggressive 35–6; nationality 54, 62 n6; otherness 31, 54, 112; policies 30–1, 55, 187–93; population 52, 185, 186t ; priorities 193; ‘problem’ 21, 32–4; research 29; resettlement 38, 55, 62 n6; resource conﬂicts 56, 156, 183, 185, 187; stereotypes 21–2, 52, 53–4, 63 n10, 65–6; terminology 21, 22, 28–30, 51 Hilltribe Welfare and Development Center of Thailand 216 Hinton, Elizabeth 110 n1, 111 n11 Hinton, Peter 1, 11, 67, 74, 83 n5 Hirsch, Philip H. 76, 155, 155f, 156 history 2–6, 22–6, 33, 45–6, 183 Hmong 30; agriculture 177, 178, 179, 185; Bo Kaeo 159, 171, 174; family 107, 179; perceptions of 22, 27, 34, 36; ‘problem’ 33, 41 n8, 53–4, 73; settlement 51, 52, 58, 183, 184f Hofstede, Geert H. 160, 161t Hoskins, Janet A. 132 houses and housing 3, 3f, 4, 31, 94, 110 n4, 139 Hovemyr, Anders P. 11, 212 hta (traditional verses) 13; formal characteristics 131, 137–9; functions 131, 133, 134–7, 141, 149, 181 n5; knowledge of 148–9; marriage hta 137, 139–48; origin and authority 132, 134–5; research 130–1, 133–4, 148; terminology 134, 138–9; transcription 142–5; translation and commentary 143, 145–8 Htaw Mei Paw 5 H’tin 21, 30, 51, 52 Htoo E Hla, Thra 13 Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary 44f, 57, 58, 62–3 n8 Hudspith, Reverend J.E. 12, 133 identity: hill tribes 30–1, 35, 40; Karen 14, 29, 34, 45, 66, 69, 126, 130, 134, 149, 211–13; (Thai) Karen 216, 217; Thai national 26–7, 48, 54, 60, 62 n6, 71

240

Index

IMPECT (Inter Mountain Peoples Education and Culture in Thailand Associaion) 65, 68, 70, 78, 81 indigeny 162–3, 181 n1, 210–11; Karen 163–5, 167–9, 177–8 Indonesia: dyadic speech 131–3, 138 Ingram, James 156 Insein Seminary 9 International Center for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) 196 Jantakad, P. 188 Jones, R.B. 7 Jørgensen, Anders Baltzer 11, 25, 26 Journal of the Siam Society 40–1 n4 Judson, Andoniram 212 Kacha-anan, Vichien 110 n8, 111 n14 Kalaya Wirasak-Yotrabam 13 Kammerer, Cornelia Ann 22, 32, 36 Kanlaya Yodrabum 110 n1 Karen: earliest references 1, 2–5; ethnic classiﬁcation 22, 27–8, 29, 214; history 2–6, 22–6, 33, 45–6, 183; nationalism 212, 213, 218 n9; ‘orphans’ 5, 6–7; population x, 8, 52; representations of 9–11, 12, 30, 34, 36, 60, 67, 70, 215; studies 9, 11–14; terminology 1–2, 23, 210, 217 n3; see also Pwo Karen; Sgaw Karen Karen Hilltribe, The 41 n6 Karen National Union (KNU) 8, 111 n14 Karen Thesaurus 5–6, 12–13 Karnjariya Sukkung 70, 74, 76, 77 Kawila, Prince 24, 25 Kawthoolei 111 n14 Kayah 8, 211, 217 n3 Keyes, Charles F. 7, 11, 15 n10, 23, 37, 39, 84 n9 kha 27, 28, 40 n3, 211 Khamu 52 Khao Yai National Park 188 khon pa 26–7, 28, 29, 30, 211 Khru Ba Khaw 76 Khun Yuam 114 Khwae river 25 Kim, Uilchol 161t King, Alonzo 2–3 Kitayama, S. 161t Ko San Lone 13 133 Ko Tha Byu 212 Krungthep Thurakit 38

Kunstadter, Peter 11, 13, 122, 186t Lahu 27, 30, 51, 52, 183, 184f, 185, 217 n5 land: degraded 185; ownership 69, 83 n3, 179, 189; resources 185; rights 62, 62 n6, 153, 189, 192, 199–200, 208; use 155–6, 155f, 174, 174t, 175, 175f, 192; see also participatory land use planning language: bilingualism 216; Burmese 8; communication 59, 66, 69, 70, 90; dyadic speech 131–3, 138; Karen 7, 23, 211, 217 n3; Pwo 8, 217 n3; Sgaw 8, 38, 138, 139, 142, 212, 217 n3; see also hta; terms of address 94, 140, 141, 181 n2; Thai 59, 70, 83 n3, 90, 127; transcription 142–3 Lanna 24–5, 26 Lat, Johnny Maung 9 Lawa 27, 51, 52 Lay Htoo, Reverend 133 Lebar, Frank M. et al. 83 n6 Lehman, F.K. 9, 11 Lemoine, Jacques 181 n6 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 161t Lewis, James Lee 8 Lieberman, Victor B. 211–12 life cycle 91–4, 110 n5 Likhit Theerawekhin 28, 29 Lisu 30, 51, 52, 183, 184f, 185 literacy 90, 101, 111 n12, 212, 216, 217 n5 literature 6, 11, 110 n1, 111 n11, 212 logging industry 34, 47, 51, 73, 156, 188, 191, 192 Lohmann, Larry 39 love songs 90, 91, 95–6, 97–8, 109, 110 n7, 133, 134, 136, 139 Lua 30, 184f, 185 Luce, G.H. 7 Mae Chanta, Umphang 33, 34 Mae Hong Son province 185, 186t, 187, 192, 194 Mae Kha Pu 159, 165, 169, 170–3, 176, 180, 181 n3; see also Bo Kaeo Mae Sariang 31, 66, 83 n5 Mae Sariang Thi Rak 12 Mae Soi, Chomthong, Chiang Mai 36 Mae Wang 13, 70, 72, 73–4; see also Ban Huai Hoi Mahda, Michael Abd-Rehman 11

Index Maine, Henry Sumner 161t Maiyot, Jarat 110 n1, 133 Malkki, Liisa H. 21 Maniratanavongsiri, Chumpol 134, 148 Manndrof, Hans 29 many-stranded social relations 166; Karen 167–9, 176; Mae Kha Pu 170–3 Markus, H. 161t Marlowe, David H. 11, 25, 121, 164, 165, 211 marriage 93, 94, 100, 165; adultery 106; age of marriage 92, 125, 126; arranged marriages 105–6; interethnic 121–2, 124–5, 129 n5, 159; monogamy 106–7, 112, 119; wedding ceremonies 102–5, 108, 118, 130–1, 137, 139–42; see also divorce; family; hta Marshall, Harry I. 11, 23, 110 n8, 133 Marx, Karl 161t, 163 Mason, Ellen H.B. 7, 12 Mason, Francis 1, 3–4, 3f, 5, 12, 133 Matisoff, James 7 Mauss, Marcel 161t McKinnon, John 21, 55 McMahon, A.R. 12 medicine men (s’ra) 114 Miao see Hmong MIGIS (Mobile Interactive GIS) 66, 78–81, 82, 84 n8 migration 32, 162, 163, 171, 183 military 41 n9, 56; see also Border Patrol Police Mills, Mary Beth 129 n6 mining 156, 174 Ministry of Agriculture 57 Mischung, Roland 11, 140, 164, 181 n5 missionaries: Burma 6, 112, 133, 212–13, 217 n7; Catholic 65, 67, 217 n6; Karen 14 n5, 133; Protestant 65, 67, 108, 212, 217 n6, 217 n7; Thailand 11, 65, 67, 169, 174, 215; see also American Baptist Mission; Boardman, George Dana; Mason, Francis Mitchell, B.R. 155f, 156 Mitchell, David 132 mobility 92, 93, 122–3, 125, 126–8; see also urban migration modernization 48, 58, 59, 60, 66, 77 Mon 131, 211 Monthon Ratchaburi 25 11

241

morality and immorality 112, 113–14; see also sexuality Morning Star (Hsätoòkau) 12 motherhood 110 n5 Mû Kä Klô, Chom Thong district 130–1, 140–2 muang 28, 54 Muang Boran 28 muh nang (unmarried girls) 92, 110 n3, 129 n1 Myanmar see Burma Nam Choan Dam 57 Nam Tok Mae Surin National Park 197 Nangsu Akkkhraphithansap 28 Nation, The 37–8, 56, 193 nation-states 39, 60, 64 National Administrative Reform Council 65 national development policy 48, 188 National Economic and Social Development Plans 188, 192 National Forest Land Allotment Project (STK) 189 National Forest Policy (1985) 55, 189 national parks 21, 183, 188, 189, 191, 197 national security 31, 32–3, 55 National Security Council 30 nationalism: Karen 212, 213, 218 n9; Thai 28, 29, 39–40, 47, 48, 56, 60, 71 nationality: hill tribes 54, 62 n6, 83 n3, 189; Thai 26–7, 28, 69, 215 Ne Win, General 215 New Year celebrations 100, 135 NGOs: Chiang Mai 65, 70–1, 72; conﬁdence-building 71–2, 81; ‘dark green’ conservation 56, 57–8; ‘light green’ community rights 51, 59 Northern Development Foundation 21 Northern Farmers Network 38, 40, 70, 205 Northern Narcotics Control Ofﬁce (NNCO) 196 Nuan Hinchiranantana 41 n6 Odochao, Joni 13, 38, 42 n11, 70, 76–7, 205 Ofﬁce of Narcotics Control Board (ONCB) 187–8, 193, 202 Ofﬁce of Secretary of National Psychological Operations 30, 31, 41 n6

242

Index 110 n5; literacy 90, 101, 111 n12; literature 6, 11, 110 n1, 111 n11; romance 90; tae (traditional verses) 134; terminology 23, 210; see also Thung Yai Naresuan; Ti Kree Say

Om Koi District, Chiang Mai 90–1, 92, 95, 139 opium: crop replacement 65, 157, 191, 193; production 32, 39–40, 52, 55, 168, 214; see also drug abuse control oral literature 5; see also hta Oy Kanjanavanit 38

Quinn, Rapin 71–2

pa (forest) 26, 27, 28 Pa-O 7, 8, 211 Palawan, Philippines 5 Parsons, Talcott 160, 161t participatory land use planning: assessment 204–8; conclusions 208–9; data management 195–6; GIS use 195–6; local political interests 195; planning 194, 204–5; research methodology 196–7; risks 195, 196; Tambon Huai Poo Ling 197–204; tambon level concerns 207–8; terminology 205–6; village level concerns 206–7 Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) 66 Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) 66, 78 Paw Lay Pah 95, 106, 110 n1 Phairot Suvanakorn 55 Phayre, Colonel Arthur 4 Pho Le Pa 13, 21 Phongpaichit, P. 156 Phuchana Sip Thit 9, 10f pigs 100, 103, 104, 141, 171 Pine, J. 217 n5 poh sae kwae (unmarried boys) 92–3 political decentralization 187, 188, 191, 192 population: Burma 8; hill tribes 52, 185, 186t ; Karen x, 8, 52; Thailand 156, 185, 186t power 22, 113 Pracha Khadikit, Phraya 27, 28 Prapas Charusathira 32 Prasong Sunsiri 32 Pratuang Narintarangkul Na Ayuthaya 70, 73, 76–7 Praya Prachakij Korajak 24 Protected Area System (PAS) 49, 51, 52 Puhomau 114 Pwo Karen 23; Christianity 11, 12, 212; dress 7; funerals 95, 110 n7, 110 n8; harmony 37, 38; identity 211; language 8, 217 n3; life cycle 91–4,

radio 169, 216 Rajah, Ananda 11, 34, 111 n16 Rama III 46 Rama V see Chulalongkorn, King Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) 78 Red Karen 14 n4, 24–5 refugees 9, 32, 215 Regional Rural Development Projects 194 relationship between individuals 108–9, 160, 166; many-stranded 166, 167–9, 170–3, 176; single-stranded 166, 174–6 Rerkasem, Benjavan and Kanok 185, 186t resettlement 38, 55, 62 n6; from forest areas 43, 189; government programmes 185, 188; Huai Kha Khaeng 58; Mae Wang 72; from national parks 188; Thung Yai Naresuan 43, 58, 59, 61–2 residence permits 62 n6 resource conﬂicts 56, 156, 183, 185, 187 rice: consumption 170, 174, 181 n6; production 99, 155–6, 155f, 157, 170, 170t, 172–3, 172f, 174, 175, 181–2 n11, 181 n7; surplus 173, 179, 181 n8 Riethmuller, Robert 156 Ripley, H.J. 3f ritual leaders (hi kho) 117–19, 120 rituals 24–5; Christianity and 120–1; family ritual (au xae) 119, 120, 164, 181 n4; Lue Pakha ceremony 74–5, 81, 82; wrist-tying rituals 118–19; see also courting rituals; dyadic speech; hta roads 66, 68, 124, 156, 159, 169, 183, 188 Robinson, Lilian S. 113 romance: and the life cycle 91–4; limits of 105–7; occasions for 95–101; Pwo Karen 90; wedding preparations 101–2; see also courting rituals; divorce; love songs; marriage Royal Forestry Department (RFD): attitudes 73; Community Forest Bill

Index 56, 191; conﬂicts 50, 209; development programmes 193, 194; forest settlement 192; Forest Villages 189; Huai Kha Khaeng 63 n8; Mae Wang 73; policies 47, 48, 49, 50, 55, 188, 189; Protected Area System 51, 62 n3; resource conﬂicts 55–6; responsibilities 56; Salween logging scandal 192; Tambon Huai Poo Ling 197, 199, 200, 207; Thai Forestry Sector Master Plan 191; Thung Yai Naresuan 43, 56–7, 58–9, 62 n3 rubber plantations 62 n4 Sa Kaw-Too 5 ‘Salween’ (ﬁlm) 215 Salween logging scandal 192 Sanga Sabhasri 13 Sangkhlaburi 25 Sanitsuda Ekachai 37 Sarit Thanarat 48 Sau Au La, Ca 6 Saw, Christopher 9 Saw Aung Hla see Sau Au La, Ca Schwörer-Kohl, Gretel 130 self-consciousness 97, 98, 136, 141 Seub Nakhasathien 57, 63 n8 sexuality: Chiang Mai 124, 125; communal sanctions 117–21; extramarital liaisons 115–17; family ritual (au xae) 119, 120; inter-ethnic transgressions 121, 124, 127–8; liberality 112; morality 118; and the ‘other’ 112, 113, 123; pre-marital 105, 111 n14, 117–18; purity 112; responsibility 115–17; sex workers 124; transgressions 113, 114–17; wrist-tying rituals 118–19 Sgaw Karen 23, 25; Christianity 11, 12, 14 n5; families 129 n2; funerals 95, 110 n7, 110 n8; identity 211; language 8, 38, 138, 139, 142, 212, 217 n3; literature 6, 11, 110 n1, 212; motherhood 110 n5; sexual morality 118; terminology 23, 210; see also Ban Huai Hoi; hta; Tambon Huai Poo Ling Shan 27, 30, 122, 123, 131 Shorto, H.L. 2 Siam 46; borders 26–7, 213; Buddhism 214; as ‘buffer state’ 26; feudal chiefs 25–6, 46, 213; frontier people 22–3; tributary relationships 23–5, 26

243

Siam Society 29, 40–1 n4 siao relationships 34–5 Sila, Sarapi 110 n8, 111 n14 slavery 4 Smith, Martin 218 n8 So Atsanachinda 12 Social Forestry Act 75 societies: dichotomy 160–1, 161t ; placeto-people nexus 160, 162–3; see also indigeny; relationship between individuals 160, 166; see also manystranded social relations Solnit, David 7 Sonny Daenpongpee 4, 14 n5 Sørensen, Per 15 n10 Sorokin, Pitirim A. 161t Southeast Asia: colonization 155; dyadic speech 131–3, 138; literacy 217 n5 spells 98, 114 Sri Nakarin Dam 58 status: of Karen in Thailand 215, 217; in Karen society 94, 105, 106, 110 n5, 168, 176, 181 n8 Stern, Theodore 1, 11, 112 Stewart-Cox, Belinda 57, 62–3 n8 Stoler, Ann Laura 113 Streckfuss, David 27 Stuart, John 14 n1 Suchira Prayulpitak 36 Summer Institute of Linguistics 217 n3 Sunton Phu 4 Surasakmontri, Chaophraya 27 Suriya Ratanakul 7, 40 n2 sustainability 13 Suthee Argaslerksh 73 tae (traditional verses) 134 Tai 1, 14 n3, 46, 62 n2, 211, 213, 217 n2 Tambon Administrative Organizations (TAO) 192, 196, 199, 207, 208 Tambon Huai Poo Ling 196, 197; Huai Hee village 197–200, 198f ; Huai Poo Loei village 200; Huai Tong village 200–2, 201f ; land use map aggregation 202–4, 203f ; Pa Kaa village 202 tambons 187, 191, 202 Tamnan Phuenmuang Chiang Mai 24–5 Tan-Kim-Yong, U. 185 Tangtham, N. 190t Tapp, Nicholas 32 Taungthu 23, 211

244

Index

teenagers 90–1, 92–3, 95, 105, 110 n8 television 66, 90, 169, 216 Thai-am Tobacco Company 73 Thai Central Committee for Drug Abuse Control 193 Thai Forestry Sector Master Plan (TFSMP) 49, 50, 191, 194 Thai-German Highland Development Programme (TG-HDP) 194; GIS use 195–204; Land Use Planning Teams (LUPT) 194, 197, 204–5; planning 194; see also participatory land use planning Thai Rath 31 Thailand’s Hill Tribes 41 n8 Thawee Thinwana 13 Thom Nithithom 14 n8 Thongchai Winichakul 23, 26, 34, 69 Thra Hasa 4, 14 n5 Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary 44f; agriculture 46–7; Border Patrol Police 46; communist insurgency 33, 41 n9; community 44–5; conﬂicts 43, 45, 47; conservation 57; cultural resistance 58–60; development stations 46; economy 46–7, 57; local changes 46; Nam Choan Dam 57; people 45–6, 57; reframings 60–2; resettlement programme 43, 58, 59, 61–2; Royal Forestry Department 43, 56–7, 58–9, 62 n3; sanctuary 43–4; Tai 46; World Heritage Site 57–8 Ti Kree Say 90–109, 110 n3, 110 n4, 110 n7, 111 n12 Tönnies, F. 160, 161t tourism 69, 124, 216 trade 35, 155, 156, 177–8 tradition 13, 39 Tribal Research Center, Chiang Mai 29, 65 Uhlig, Harald 156 UN-Sam Mun Highland Development Project 194 United States Operations Mission (USOM) 33

upland and lowland 34–5, 184, 184f urban migration 124, 125–6, 127, 129 n6, 129 n7 utilities 68, 124 Vatikiotis, Michael 129 n7 Veerasak Yodrabum 110 n1 Veerawat Theeraprasat 41 n9 Vienne, Bernard 32, 55 villages 3, 164–5, 168; boundaries 194, 196, 197, 199, 200, 206–7; registration 193, 200, 207; see also Ban Huai Hoi; Mae Kha Pu Vithoon Pungprasert 73 Volkman, Toby A. 132 von Brandenstein, Mr 143 Wade, Jonathan 5, 12 Walker, Aandrew 218 n11 Wanat Bhruksasri 29 Waralak Itthi-pon-o-lan 13 warfare 4, 23 watershed classiﬁcation 189, 190t, 193, 197, 206, 209 Weber, Max 161t whisky rituals 101, 102, 103–4, 111 n13, 141 Williams, Raymond 64, 70, 81, 82, 83–4 n7 Wirth, Louis 160, 161t Woradet Sakdawut, Prince of Thailand 11 World Bank 57, 58 Wright, Susan 38, 41–2 n10 Yakhop 9 yang 2, 23, 27, 40 n2, 211, 217 n1 Yao 29, 51, 52, 183, 184f, 185 Yonok Chronicle 24 Young, Gordon 67, 186t Yuan 213 Ywa 5, 6, 212 Zerner, Charles 132 Zimmerman, Carl 155 Zinke, Paul et al. 13

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