Remaining Karen: a Study of Cultural Reproduction and the Maintenance of Identity

RemaininG KaRen A STUDY OF CULTURAL REPRODUCTION AND THE MAINTENANCE OF IDENTITY RemaininG KaRen A STUDY OF CULTURAL REPRODUCTION AND THE MAINTENANCE OF IDENTITY Ananda RAjAH MONOgraphs in AnthropologY Series Published by ANU E Press The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200, Australia Email: [email protected] This title is also available online at: http://epress.anu.edu.au/karen_citation.html National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Author: Rajah, Ananda. Title: Remaining Karen : a study of cultural reproduction and the maintenance of identity / Ananda Rajah. ISBN: 9781921536106 (pbk.) 9781921536113 (pdf) Notes: Bibliography. Subjects: Sgaw Karen (Southeast Asian people)--Ethnic identity. Ethnology--Thailand--Chiang Mai (Province) Dewey Number: 305.895 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Cover design by Teresa Prowse. Cover image ‘Two Skaw Karen women digging yam’ by Runako von Luebke Printed by University Printing Services, ANU This edition © 2008 ANU E Press Table of Contents Foreword vii Abstract ix Acknowledgements xi Note on Transcription xv Chapter I. Introduction 1 Chapter II. Settlement History, Headmanship, and the Lord of the 25 Water, Lord of the Land Chapter III. Kinship, Marriage, and Domestic Social Organisation 57 Chapter IV. Village Organisation and the Sociology of Production 105 and Consumption Chapter V. The Economy of Palokhi: Subsistence in a Regional Context 135 Chapter VI. Agricultural Rituals: The Ceremonial Cycle in Palokhi 189 Chapter VII. Conclusion: Cultural Reproduction and the Maintenance 243 of Identity Appendix A. The ‘Au’ Ma Xae Ritual 257 Appendix B. Labour Expended on Agricultural Activities and 271 Co—Operative Labour Exchanges in Palokhi (21 January 1981 – 31 December 1981) Appendix C. A Note on Work and Wage Work in Palokhi 275 Appendix D. Swidden Cultivation in Palokhi 279 Appendix E. Crops Grown in Palokhi Swiddens 289 Appendix F. Wet-Rice Cultivation in Palokhi 291 Appendix G. The Agistment of Buffaloes and Cattle in Palokhi 297 Appendix H. Examples of Household Budgets in Palokhi 301 Appendix I. The Origin of the Karen: An “Official” History 307 Bibliography 313 v Foreword This publication of Remaining Karen is intended as a tribute to Ananda Rajah and his consummate skills as an ethnographer. It is also a tribute to his long-term engagement in the study of the Karen. Remaining Karen was Ananda Rajah's first focused study of the Sgaw Karen of Palokhi in northern Thailand, which he submitted in 1986 for this PhD in the Department of Anthropology in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at The Australian National University. It is a work of superlative ethnography set in an historical and regional context and as such retains its value to the present. Throughout his academic career, Ananda would return again and again to the study of the Karen. Initially his focus was specific to the Sgaw Karen but increasingly he took up a concern with the issues of Karen refugees both in Thailand and Burma. At the time of his sudden, untimely death, Ananda was finishing a paper on the Karen naming system and preparing an edited volume on the refugee situation for which he had proposed the tentative title: Karen refugees in the Thailand-Burma borderlands: Ethnic conflict, flight and cultural change. Ananda's ethnographic investigations involved a continuing engagement with the Karen and his hesitation in publishing his thesis stemmed from a hope that he would, one day, be able to write an even more comprehensive account of Karen social life. His death has ended this possibility; hence, the need now to make publicly available the considerable work that he had already done on understanding the Karen. Anthropological fieldwork invariably begins in some microcosm of a much larger community. In Ananda's case, as he makes clear, the Sgaw Karen settlement at Palokhi consisted of just twenty households. It was in the intimacy of this community that Ananda mastered his understanding of Karen ritual and social practice ± the basis, as he argued, for a distinctive local Karen identity. His work centred on domestic organization and agricultural rituals from which he developed his notion of a `procreative model' of social life and, in his final chapter, endeavoured to compare this conception with contrasting notions of origin and identity held by other Karen groups. The acknowledgements in this work are themselves revealing. They chart Ananda's progress through the different stages of his doctoral research. He alludes to the contributions of his three supervisors. Clearly Gehan Wijeyewardene and Ted Chapman, both Thai specialists and scholars were crucial in their support of his research and formative in their advice to him. My task, as the supervisor with the least knowledge of Thailand, was one of continual interrogation, probing him to explain what needed to be made clear. No less important, however, was the community of fellow students with whom Ananda was in continual discussion while he was in Canberra and a similar community vii Remaining Karen of close colleagues at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore where he eventually completed his thesis. Ananda was the most affable of scholars who enjoyed the conviviality of good company and never tired of engaging conversation. He was able to derive a special personal and intellectual sustenance from this engagement. If there is one memory of Ananda that persists, it is of his love of the camaraderie of his friends and acquaintances. This virtue allowed him to seek out new acquaintances with whom to engage in a variety of different settings and made him an ideal fieldworker and a notable ethnographer. James J. Fox viii Abstract There are an estimated 242,000 Karen in Thailand making them the largest ethnic minority in the country second only to the Chinese. In Burma, they number approximately 2.2 million. The Karen, of whom the Sgaw and Pwo represent the two largest groups based on dialectal differences, speak a number of related languages which are now recognised as belonging to the Sino-Tibetan group of languages. Since the early part of the last century, the Karen have been the subject of a number of studies by missionaries and British colonial administrators in Burma and, more recently, by anthropologists in Thailand. Two major areas of interest in the long history of Karen studies have been the nature of Karen religious systems which appear to draw on various traditions, and the nature of Karen identity which appears remarkably resistant to change. While Karen religious traditions and customs were a dominant concern in earlier studies, the question of Karen ethnic identity (or identities) has been the focus of interest in contemporary studies, matched perhaps only by an interest in Karen subsistence or economic systems. Though the more recent anthropological studies of the Karen have retained an interest in Karen religious systems, related in most part to the study of Karen ethnicity, it is remarkable that there has not been a detailed contemporary account of the indigenous, non-Buddhist, non-Christian religion of the Karen. This study is concerned with both issues Ð the nature of indigenous Karen religion and the maintenance of identity in a small Karen community which is firmly located, as much by necessity as by choice, in a predominantly Northern Thai socio-economic milieu in the highlands of Northern Thailand. It is also concerned with sociological explanation as well as anthropological description, in the case of the Karen, namely the part played by an indigenous religion (which draws little from Buddhism or Christianity, both of which have had considerable influence on Karen elsewhere) in the maintenance of identity. At one level, therefore, this study may be regarded as an attempt to fill a gap in the contemporary ethnography of the Karen, that is, to provide an account of an indigenous Karen religious system as a system in its own right but taken broadly to show how it encompasses different facets of life in one Karen community. At another level, this study addresses a larger sociological issue in the study of the Karen: how a cultural identity may be constituted (and reconstituted as an on-going process) and the implications that this may have for an understanding of Karen ethnicity the principles of which, though perhaps sufficiently established as a matter of conventional sociological wisdom, have not been adequately demonstrated in relation to hard ethnographic fact. The major argument in this thesis, stated in its most general terms, is that religion and ritual sustain and reproduce what is best regarded as a cultural ix Remaining Karen ideology which provides a cultural identity, and from which an ethnic identity may be constructed according to the particular circumstances and details of the contexts of intergroup relations. In the case of the Sgaw Karen of Palokhi, in Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand, who are the subject of this study, it is argued that this cultural ideology consists of the structured relations between what is best described as a ªprocreative modelº of society and social processes, an integral part of which is a system of social classification based on the difference between male and female, cultural definitions of the relations between the two and the relationship between men and land, and a ªmodelº of agricultural processes. The cultural ideology of the Palokhi Karen is ªreproducedº in and through their religious system and ritual life, which is dominated by men who play a crucial role, and it is this which provides them with their distinctive cultural identity. x Acknowledgements This thesis and the research on which it is based would not have been possible without the support of several institutions and individuals.

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