Discarding the basket: The reinterpretation of tradition by Akha christians of Northern Thailand

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

Volumn 27, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 320-333

  Kammerer, Cornelia Ann ^a  

^a BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 5244254962     PISSN: 00224634     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022463400021081     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. ̌] (Chiang Rai, Thailand: Development and Agricultural Project for Akha [DAPA], 1989). This is the script known to the majority of literate Akha Protestants in Burma and Thailand. (Akha Catholics on both sides of the border use a different Roman-based script.) A Thai-based script is popular among younger Protestants in Thailand; I have no knowledge of the extent of its use in Burma.
2. ̌] (Chiang Rai, Thailand: Development and Agricultural Project for Akha [DAPA], 1989). This is the script known to the majority of literate Akha Protestants in Burma and Thailand. (Akha Catholics on both sides of the border use a different Roman-based script.) A Thai-based script is popular among younger Protestants in Thailand; I have no knowledge of the extent of its use in Burma.
3. See, for instance, F.K. Lehman, "Ethnic Categories in Burma and the Theory of Social Systems", Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and Nations, Vol. 1, ed. Peter Kunstadter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 97-98; R. Provencher, Mainland Southeast Asia: An Anthropological Perspective (Pacific Palisades, CA: Goodyear Publishing Company, 1975), p. 108; and C.A. Kammerer, "Customs and Christian Conversion among Akha Highlanders of Burma and Thailand", American Ethnologist 17,2 (1990): 285.
4. See, for instance, F.K. Lehman, "Ethnic Categories in Burma and the Theory of Social Systems", Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and Nations, Vol. 1, ed. Peter Kunstadter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 97-98; R. Provencher, Mainland Southeast Asia: An Anthropological Perspective (Pacific Palisades, CA: Goodyear Publishing Company, 1975), p. 108; and C.A. Kammerer, "Customs and Christian Conversion among Akha Highlanders of Burma and Thailand", American Ethnologist 17,2 (1990): 285.
5. See, for instance, F.K. Lehman, "Ethnic Categories in Burma and the Theory of Social Systems", Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and Nations, Vol. 1, ed. Peter Kunstadter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 97-98; R. Provencher, Mainland Southeast Asia: An Anthropological Perspective (Pacific Palisades, CA: Goodyear Publishing Company, 1975), p. 108; and C.A. Kammerer, "Customs and Christian Conversion among Akha Highlanders of Burma and Thailand", American Ethnologist 17,2 (1990): 285.
6. L. Alting von Geusau, "Dialectics of Akhazaη: The Interiorizations of a Perennial Minority Group", Highlanders of Thailand, ed. J. McKinnon and Wanat Bhruksasri (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 246; Tribal Research Institute, Tribal Population Summary (Chiang Mai, Thailand, 1990).
7. L. Alting von Geusau, "Dialectics of Akhazaη: The Interiorizations of a Perennial Minority Group", Highlanders of Thailand, ed. J. McKinnon and Wanat Bhruksasri (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 246; Tribal Research Institute, Tribal Population Summary (Chiang Mai, Thailand, 1990).
8. Official government census figures are 95 per cent and 97 per cent, respectively. See C.F. Keyes, Thailand: Buddhist Kingdom as Modern Nation-State (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987), pp. 14-15.
9. See C.A. Kammerer, "Customs and Christian Conversion". Among Akha in Burma, Catholics are apparently in the majority, followed by Protestants and then traditionalists. In Thailand, in contrast, most Akha are traditionalists; Protestants form the next largest group, and Catholics are in the minority. Inadequate census data make numerical estimates impossible.
10. L. Alting von Geusau, "Dialectics of Akhazaη", p. 246.
11. Overseas Missionary Fellowship, "The Akha Church is Celebrating!", East Asia's Millions 95,4 (1987): 78.
12. J. Nightingale, "Jubilee of Joy", East Asia's Millions 95,4 (1987): 82; P. Nightingale, "The Akha Work", App. I in I. Kuhn, Ascent to the Tribes: Pioneering in North Thailand (London: Overseas Missionary Fellowship [agents Lutterworth Press], 1968), p. 265.
13. J. Nightingale, "Jubilee of Joy", East Asia's Millions 95,4 (1987): 82; P. Nightingale, "The Akha Work", App. I in I. Kuhn, Ascent to the Tribes: Pioneering in North Thailand (London: Overseas Missionary Fellowship [agents Lutterworth Press], 1968), p. 265.
14. Kayeh, one of the early Akha settlements in Thailand, was visited in the 1930s by Hugo Adolf Bernatzik, the first trained ethnographer to study Akha in Thailand or elsewhere. See his monograph Akha and Miao: Problems of Applied Ethnography in Farther India, trans. Alois Nagler (New Haven: Human Relations Area Files, 1970 [1947]), p. 3. Not long after the initial conversions to Christianity, traditionalist Akha from Kayeh dispersed, founding villages in Chiang Rai Province south of the Mae Kok River. As of 1988, the site of Kayeh was the Lahu Protestant village of Goshen.
15. Overseas Missionary Fellowship, "The Akha Church Is Celebrating!", p. 80.
16. J. Nightingale, "Jubilee of Joy", pp. 81-82.
17. Overseas Missionary Fellowship, "The Akha Church Is Celebrating!", p. 79.
18. Jean Nightingale, Without a Gate (Singapore: Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1990), p. 359.
19. ̂ (Rangoon, no publisher, no date), p. 36.
20. I asked Paul Lewis if he recollected the discussions surrounding translation of these verses from Matthew, since I was curious about the absence of an obvious term ("yoke") and the presence of an unusual one (the verb meaning "to carry from a pole over one shoulder"). He had no memory of the passage presenting particular problems and therefore could not provide any insight into the translation process.
21. ̌ by other anthropologists see L. Alting von Geusau, "Dialectics of Akhazarη" and D.E. Tooker, "Inside and Outside: Schematic Replication at the Levels of Village, Household and Person among the Akha of Northern Thailand" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1988), in particular pp. 37-39, and ''Identity Systems of Highland Burma: 'Belief, Akha Zaη, and a Critique of Interiorized Notions of Ethnoreligious Identity", Man (n.s.) 27,4 (1992).
22. ̌ by other anthropologists see L. Alting von Geusau, "Dialectics of Akhazarη" and D.E. Tooker, "Inside and Outside: Schematic Replication at the Levels of Village, Household and Person among the Akha of Northern Thailand" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1988), in particular pp. 37-39, and ''Identity Systems of Highland Burma: 'Belief, Akha Zaη, and a Critique of Interiorized Notions of Ethnoreligious Identity", Man (n.s.) 27,4 (1992).
23. ̌ by other anthropologists see L. Alting von Geusau, "Dialectics of Akhazarη" and D.E. Tooker, "Inside and Outside: Schematic Replication at the Levels of Village, Household and Person among the Akha of Northern Thailand" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1988), in particular pp. 37-39, and ''Identity Systems of Highland Burma: 'Belief, Akha Zaη, and a Critique of Interiorized Notions of Ethnoreligious Identity", Man (n.s.) 27,4 (1992).
24. ̌ by other anthropologists see L. Alting von Geusau, "Dialectics of Akhazarη" and D.E. Tooker, "Inside and Outside: Schematic Replication at the Levels of Village, Household and Person among the Akha of Northern Thailand" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1988), in particular pp. 37-39, and ''Identity Systems of Highland Burma: 'Belief, Akha Zaη, and a Critique of Interiorized Notions of Ethnoreligious Identity", Man (n.s.) 27,4 (1992).
25. ̌ by other anthropologists see L. Alting von Geusau, "Dialectics of Akhazarη" and D.E. Tooker, "Inside and Outside: Schematic Replication at the Levels of Village, Household and Person among the Akha of Northern Thailand" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1988), in particular pp. 37-39, and ''Identity Systems of Highland Burma: 'Belief, Akha Zaη, and a Critique of Interiorized Notions of Ethnoreligious Identity", Man (n.s.) 27,4 (1992).
26. ̌ were also on display.
27. C.A. Kammerer, "Gateway to the Akha World", pp. 316-26.
28. Nightingale, Without a Gate, p. 345. This gateway is itself another example of the reinterpretation of traditional symbolic forms. At the upper and lower ends of every traditionalist village, a gateway festooned with chains of bamboo rings and flanked by carved male and female figures with exaggerated genitalia marks the boundary between the dwelling place of human beings and domestic animals and the dwelling place of spirits and wild animals in the surrounding forest. Among traditionalist Akha, these forest spirits are differentiated from ancestor spirits, whom foreign missionaries view as evil spirits or demons and may, in fact, confuse with these dangerous non-ancestral spirits. See C.A. Kammerer, "Gateway to the Akha World", pp. 32-35, 50-52, and Kammerer, "Shifting Gender Asymmetries among Akha of Northern Thailand", in Gender, Power, and the Construction of the Moral Order: Studies from the Thai Periphery, ed. Nancy Eberhardt (Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison, Monograph 4, Center of Southeast Asian Studies, 1988) for additional discussions of the meaning of this gateway and associated myths in traditional Akha culture. Like the image of the laden basket, the Jubilee gateway was part of both intraethnic and interethnic dialogues of identity. Prior to the Jubilee, it was the subject of contestation between Akha Protestants, who originally constructed a traditionalist gateway, and foreign missionaries, who objected to what they considered a heathen gateway at the entrance to the Jubilee grounds. As the title of Jean Nightingale's memoir demonstrates, foreign missionaries equate being "without a gate" with being an Akha Protestant. Nightingale's phrase recalls that the original Akha converts to Christianity in Thailand were expelled from Kayeh and forced to live outside the village's traditional gateways; that Akha Protestant villages have no "demon gateways"; and that Christianity, in the words of an Akha preacher's rendering of Matthew 16:18, is "a gate-breaking church" (cited in Without a Gate, p. 360).
29. Nightingale, Without a Gate, p. 345. This gateway is itself another example of the reinterpretation of traditional symbolic forms. At the upper and lower ends of every traditionalist village, a gateway festooned with chains of bamboo rings and flanked by carved male and female figures with exaggerated genitalia marks the boundary between the dwelling place of human beings and domestic animals and the dwelling place of spirits and wild animals in the surrounding forest. Among traditionalist Akha, these forest spirits are differentiated from ancestor spirits, whom foreign missionaries view as evil spirits or demons and may, in fact, confuse with these dangerous non-ancestral spirits. See C.A. Kammerer, "Gateway to the Akha World", pp. 32-35, 50-52, and Kammerer, "Shifting Gender Asymmetries among Akha of Northern Thailand", in Gender, Power, and the Construction of the Moral Order: Studies from the Thai Periphery, ed. Nancy Eberhardt (Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison, Monograph 4, Center of Southeast Asian Studies, 1988) for additional discussions of the meaning of this gateway and associated myths in traditional Akha culture. Like the image of the laden basket, the Jubilee gateway was part of both intraethnic and interethnic dialogues of identity. Prior to the Jubilee, it was the subject of contestation between Akha Protestants, who originally constructed a traditionalist gateway, and foreign missionaries, who objected to what they considered a heathen gateway at the entrance to the Jubilee grounds. As the title of Jean Nightingale's memoir demonstrates, foreign missionaries equate being "without a gate" with being an Akha Protestant. Nightingale's phrase recalls that the original Akha converts to Christianity in Thailand were expelled from Kayeh and forced to live outside the village's traditional gateways; that Akha Protestant villages have no "demon gateways"; and that Christianity, in the words of an Akha preacher's rendering of Matthew 16:18, is "a gate-breaking church" (cited in Without a Gate, p. 360).
30. Nightingale, Without a Gate, p. 345. This gateway is itself another example of the reinterpretation of traditional symbolic forms. At the upper and lower ends of every traditionalist village, a gateway festooned with chains of bamboo rings and flanked by carved male and female figures with exaggerated genitalia marks the boundary between the dwelling place of human beings and domestic animals and the dwelling place of spirits and wild animals in the surrounding forest. Among traditionalist Akha, these forest spirits are differentiated from ancestor spirits, whom foreign missionaries view as evil spirits or demons and may, in fact, confuse with these dangerous non-ancestral spirits. See C.A. Kammerer, "Gateway to the Akha World", pp. 32-35, 50-52, and Kammerer, "Shifting Gender Asymmetries among Akha of Northern Thailand", in Gender, Power, and the Construction of the Moral Order: Studies from the Thai Periphery, ed. Nancy Eberhardt (Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison, Monograph 4, Center of Southeast Asian Studies, 1988) for additional discussions of the meaning of this gateway and associated myths in traditional Akha culture. Like the image of the laden basket, the Jubilee gateway was part of both intraethnic and interethnic dialogues of identity. Prior to the Jubilee, it was the subject of contestation between Akha Protestants, who originally constructed a traditionalist gateway, and foreign missionaries, who objected to what they considered a heathen gateway at the entrance to the Jubilee grounds. As the title of Jean Nightingale's memoir demonstrates, foreign missionaries equate being "without a gate" with being an Akha Protestant. Nightingale's phrase recalls that the original Akha converts to Christianity in Thailand were expelled from Kayeh and forced to live outside the village's traditional gateways; that Akha Protestant villages have no "demon gateways"; and that Christianity, in the words of an Akha preacher's rendering of Matthew 16:18, is "a gate-breaking church" (cited in Without a Gate, p. 360).
31. Nightingale, Without a Gate, p. 345. This gateway is itself another example of the reinterpretation of traditional symbolic forms. At the upper and lower ends of every traditionalist village, a gateway festooned with chains of bamboo rings and flanked by carved male and female figures with exaggerated genitalia marks the boundary between the dwelling place of human beings and domestic animals and the dwelling place of spirits and wild animals in the surrounding forest. Among traditionalist Akha, these forest spirits are differentiated from ancestor spirits, whom foreign missionaries view as evil spirits or demons and may, in fact, confuse with these dangerous non-ancestral spirits. See C.A. Kammerer, "Gateway to the Akha World", pp. 32-35, 50-52, and Kammerer, "Shifting Gender Asymmetries among Akha of Northern Thailand", in Gender, Power, and the Construction of the Moral Order: Studies from the Thai Periphery, ed. Nancy Eberhardt (Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison, Monograph 4, Center of Southeast Asian Studies, 1988) for additional discussions of the meaning of this gateway and associated myths in traditional Akha culture. Like the image of the laden basket, the Jubilee gateway was part of both intraethnic and interethnic dialogues of identity. Prior to the Jubilee, it was the subject of contestation between Akha Protestants, who originally constructed a traditionalist gateway, and foreign missionaries, who objected to what they considered a heathen gateway at the entrance to the Jubilee grounds. As the title of Jean Nightingale's memoir demonstrates, foreign missionaries equate being "without a gate" with being an Akha Protestant. Nightingale's phrase recalls that the original Akha converts to Christianity in Thailand were expelled from Kayeh and forced to live outside the village's traditional gateways; that Akha Protestant villages have no "demon gateways"; and that Christianity, in the words of an Akha preacher's rendering of Matthew 16:18, is "a gate-breaking church" (cited in Without a Gate, p. 360).
32. ̂ (no date), p. 36; see also Lewis, Akha-English Dictionary, pp. 16, 164, 188, 221, and 230.
33. ̂ (no date), p. 36; see also Lewis, Akha-English Dictionary, pp. 16, 164, 188, 221, and 230.
34. Overseas Missionary Fellowship, "The Akha Church Is Celebrating!", p. 78.
35. I am grateful to Paul Kratoska for calling this point to my attention.
36. For discussions of this point see C.A. Kammerer, "Gateway to the Akha World"', p. 269 and "Customs and Christian Conversion", pp. 280-81.
37. For discussions of this point see C.A. Kammerer, "Gateway to the Akha World"', p. 269 and "Customs and Christian Conversion", pp. 280-81.
38. For a detailed analysis of the political economy of poverty among Thailand's tribal minorities see C.A. Kammerer, O. Klein Hutheesing, Ralana Maneeprasert and P.V. Symonds, "Vulnerability to HIV Infection among Three Hilltribes in Northern Thailand", in Culture and Sexual Risk: Anthropological Perspectives on AIDS, ed. H. ten Brummelhuis and G. Herdt (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers, 1995), pp. 53-75.