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Identity Systems of Highland Burma: 'Belief', Akha Zan, and a Critique of Interiorized Notions of Ethno-Religious Identity
Abstract
While 'belief' as an interiorized, propositional capacity may be universal, when discussing the domain of 'religion' it must be viewed as a trope, that is, as a particular and historically specific Western cultural idiom for expressing people's relationship to tradition. This idiom emphasizes the interiority of ethno-religious identity. Drawing on ethnographic material from the Akha of Northern Thailand and some other Asian societies, it is argued that while 'belief' as an interiorizing notion is relevant in some contexts, it is not at all relevant to Akha cultural discourse on the relationship to tradition. There, ethno-religious identity takes an exteriorized form. This finding is used to expose the assumption of interiority in the various anthropological approaches to religious belief, and its implications for discussions of scepticism and critical thought are explored.
... The meeting was organised for the sake of Pima's newborn grandson, a baby born with webbed toes. This tiny physical deformity, according to Akha li2(礼) (Wang 2019: 30), the Akha "way of life" (Alting Von Geusau 1983: 249) that defines their ethnic identity (Kammerer 1990;Tooker 1992), made the child a dangerously polluting "not-good baby" (buhao de wawa "不好的娃娃") or "tsawrpaeq"3 who, in Akha terms, ought to be eliminated. The Akha concept of a "not-good baby" includes those born as twins (or other multiples), or having cleft palates, extra digits or webbed digits. ...
... The Akha's abnormally born babies have been the topic of study by many anthropologists (e.g. Lewis 1969;Grunfeld 1982;Tooker 1992;Mansfield 2000). Lewis, for the first time, provided a detailed ethnographic account of the cosmological meanings as well as the ritual process of both infanticide and purification among the Akha group in Burma. ...
... The second option of moving out with the baby nicely avoids the legal issue, but still brings a heavy social cost. Keeping an abnormal child instead of respecting the greatest li means giving up ethnic identity (Tooker 1992). It is self-imposed exile. ...
... Therefore, the question about pioneering would not be: How do people break free from a traditional setting? Even where local terms for 'tradition' have some history -as among the Lisu (Diao, this issue), Akha (Tooker 1992), Lahu (Walker 2003: 429) or Sgaw Karen (Hayami 2004: 4) -as concepts they are very much present-day institutions. They serve to enable discussions about what to adopt from the outside and what to resist. ...
... The distinction between this world and matters beyond evokes so-called world religions, compared to whom most indigenous cosmologies of upland Southeast Asia appear as staunchly immanent (e.g. Tooker 1992). However, I suggest that the value of transcending bounded localities that is used to gain power from afar conceptually and historically prepares the arrival of transcendent religions. ...
en Upland pioneering involves variations of two themes: drawing in power from the outside and the transcendence of local bounded social entities. Both integrate the distinction between inside and outside at the base of sociality in upland Southeast Asia. Pioneering is a valorised activity that continuously takes on new forms and thereby exemplifies the dynamics of inside and outside. Data from the Rmeet in Laos show that these movements have a gendered dimension.
Pouvoir et transcendance : un commentaire sur les pionniers des hautes terres
fr Le pionnage des hautes terres consiste en des variations de deux thèmes: attirer du pouvoir de l’extérieur et la transcendance d’entités sociales délimitée localement. Tous deux intègrent la distinction entre l’intérieur et l’extérieur à la base de la socialité des hautes terres d’Asie du Sud-Est. Le pionnage est une activité valorisée qui prend continuellement de nouvelles formes et illustre ainsi la dynamique de l’intérieur et de l’extérieur. Des données du Rmeet au Laos montrent donc que ces mouvements ont une dimension genrée.
... Indeed, how is it possible to distinguish between the two? However, in her discussion of the Akha cultural group in Northern Thailand, Deborah Tooker critiques the propositional and interiorising assumptions in the various anthropological approaches to this issue of religious cognition (Tooker 1992). Although she concedes that there may be some element of religious cognition which can be found on a universal level, the process of locating religious manifestations in beliefs (that is, in propositions that are affirmed by individuals as true rather than false) is by no means universal. ...
... A person's religion does not exist beyond a particular embodied manifestation (a circumcision or a building, or a particular discourse), it is embedded within the experience of that manifestation and cannot be abstracted out of it. In talking about religion in this way, it is possible to incorporate Tooker's (1992) perspective coming from her Akha informants-that is a religiosity that is manifest in the business of ‗carrying', rather than any ‗interiorisation'. Such an understanding of religiosity considers manifestations which are particular to embodied experiences. ...
Scholars who identify themselves as anthropologists of religion attempt to work across the disciplinary divisions between religion and social/cultural anthropology , to varying degrees of success. In this paper I review some contemporary perspectives on how anthropology of religion has been developed, placing particular emphasis on the shift from religion-as-belief to religion-as-embodied-practice. However, an approach which considers religion as practice may need to rethink the religion-concept itself, and I suggest that anthropologists should begin to think of ‗religioning' rather than ‗religion', as a means of reconceptualising this shift. In conclusion I explore alternative tropes for such a discourse on religioning, looking at the play and work of religious practice.
... Although I was familiar with this anthropological line of thinking, nothing convinced me more of its validity than doing fieldwork among the Akha, who, I discovered, had also convinced anthropologists who went there prior to me. Living among them in upland Thailand in the 1980s, Deborah Tooker (1992) observed that people do not care very much about whether spirits ultimately exist or not. They relate to their customs in terms of 'practice' rather than 'belief.' ...
Any progress in shaping up an externalist psychiatry, so previous discussion suggested, must begin from questions about the ontology of social causation. So far, research and theory have adhered to a naturalistic approach to the social causes of illness, concentrating mostly on the ‘social determinants of mental health’ (inequality, discrimination, housing insecurity, etc.). The paper starts with an assessment of ‘social determinants’ through the lens of epidemiology and critical psychiatry. It illustrates existing practical and political approaches that fight these constraints and it highlights their therapeutic value. It argues, though, that a focus on social determinants is not sufficient for fully realizing externalism because a great portion of sociogenic illness remains causally indeterminate. Alongside political action, externalism requires a social etiology that is established by virtue of the meaning that it holds for patients, rather than by virtue of its capacity to identify objective social causes of illness. This entails abandoning naturalism about social causation and embracing constructivism. The paper shows that this methodological shift is less contradictory and more effective than it is commonly imagined. Drawing from further anthropological evidence, it concludes that only by lending support to projects that balance a focus on constraints with social construction will psychiatry be truly externalist. At stake is a prospect of effective treatment for sociogenic illness for the countless in struggle.
... If 'religion' is a nonoperative concept, the same can be said about 'beliefs' . Studying the Akha people of Myanmar, Tooker (1992) chooses the words 'traditions' and 'customs' rather than 'religion' and the duty to 'carry' the spirits more than 'belief' in their existence. Even though I disapprove of excessive usage of 'cultural universals' , I must admit Tooker's conclusions to the Yorùbá case. ...
This essay aims to focus on the concept of religion and its conceptual implications in the observation of African religions, taking the Yorùbá and Candomblé religious attitudes and beliefs as case studies. I intend to trace a new itinerary in the conceptualization of African religious experiences, using native structures as the setting for theory. I point out that African-Yorùbá religious experience is deeply merged with ritual practice – religion is made – and tied to a sense of origins and duties that must be fulfilled. In that vein, I present alternative categories to the classic ones of monotheism, polytheism, and pantheon.
... Moreover, the "belief" of others stands in oppositionsometimes explicit, more often implicit-to the methodological atheism of the anthropological "self" ( Blanes 2006 ; Stewart et al. 2001 ). As a number of commentators have pointed out, this is not how many people in much of the world experience their religion ( Evans-Pritchard 1956 ;Mitchell and Mitchell 2008 ;Needham 1972 ;Tooker 1992 ). Religious ideas, or indeed any other ideas, are not things which you "believe in" or not; they are knowledge-or even further, they simply are. ...
... As Pandey argues (Pandey 2005, p. 415) what is 'conjured up' is an idea of the community as an entity 1 For the purposes of this paper, the dialogue between Robbins and Howell is both useful and sufficient to lay the ground for the notion of community that I wish to foreground here. However, it must be acknowledged that there are many views on this question of belief in the context of Christianity including for instance Kirsch's (Kirsch 2004) articulation of the unstable and cyclical nature of believing dependent on its performative power or Tooker's idea of belief not being an internal condition of assent (Tooker 1992). See also (Engelke 2002). ...
The anthropology of Christianity has emerged as an exciting field in the last decade or so. Themes of interest for us in India and South Asia in general include issues of caste, conversion and belief, the ideas of sin and morality, individualism, and the like. As part of this growing field, the issue of belief in particular has gained considerable importance. It has been argued that the strict reliance on belief is obstructive and counterproductive for the understanding of non-Western Christianity, particularly where religious affiliations may be shifting rather than stable. Moreover, it has been suggested that belief could be laid aside in favor of the notion of commitment, wherein the latter term encompasses presence, embodiment, shared social location, and the like. This paper argues that while the discourse oscillates between belief on the one hand and commitment on the other, the intermediating term between these might be community. There are social and spiritual divisions, which the available discourse does not immediately allow us to contend with. In the words of one Dalit Catholic, the church must be with its people, the Bishop-Shepherd must ‘smell’ his sheep. This paper will explore how it is precisely the absence of community that Dalit Catholics experience when they find that Christian equality becomes physical separation and Christian fraternity remains outside the social domain and will suggest the implications this has for the anthropology of Christianity.
... Manuel Gutiérrez Estévez (2009) quien analizó la diferencia conceptual entre "las religiones de Yahvé" y las que prevalecen entre poblaciones amerindias, caracterizó este tipo de representación dual dentro del mismo credo como constituida por una "ambivalencia elemental", una lógica en la cual "las maneras" priman sobre la sustancia, en la cual la forma se vuelve "la verdadera sustancia ética". Distinciones similares se encuentran en otros grupos autóctonos que han sido sujetos a la evangelización, en el continente americano o fuera (Wachtel 1990;Tooker 1992). Esos casos muestran la importancia de entender las inferencias por las cuales colectivos autóctonos cristianizados aprehenden su universo religioso compuesto y las relaciones que se entretejen en él. ...
p>Los ritos de curación indígena contemporáneos se caracterizan a menudo como derivados de un “sincretismo religioso” por la presencia en ellos de aspectos religiosos de orígenes distintos. Sin embargo, si bien este término procede de una constatación de una realidad social y religiosa post evangelizada, no aporta al entendimiento de la estructura de estos ritos ni de su significado para sus participantes. En cambio, si los tratamos analíticamente, con los mismos términos de los interlocutores autóctonos, la comprensión de su gestualidad y prácticas al realizar los ritos de curación, permite integrar la agentividad intelectual de los actores. Así abarcamos de otra forma el sincretismo y el análisis de ritos nahua y teenek de la Huasteca veracruzana, anclados en una descripción etnográfica densa, así como en su contexto histórico, lo que permite vislumbrar lógicas internas en torno al credo específico subyacente a estos ritos.</p
... 36 There are a number of good grounds to resist readings such as Horton's. Among others, one reason is that so-called primitive relativism is not only intercultural, but also intracultural and even "auto-cultural," and, to boot, expresses neither tolerance nor indifference, but rather an absolute departure from the crypto-theological idea of "culture" as a set of beliefs (Tooker 1992;Viveiros de Castro 1993). The main reason to resist such readings, however, is perfectly prefigured in Gow's own comments, namely, that the idea of "parochialism" translates the Santa Clara debate into the terms of the teacher's position, with her natural universalism and (more or less tolerant) cultural particularism. ...
... Focusing on how pious selves are instigated by practices of worship, they highlight the significance of the way in which norms are related and diffused in social relations. Although the articulations of Mahmood and others contribute to our understanding of Islamic subjects and societies, they still consider piety and belief intricately tied to the interior self (Asad 2012;Tooker 1992) and retain the conventional conceptualisation of the self as that who either instigates or is constituted by moral conduct, that is practices that the self is engaged with. ...
Drawing on an ethnographic research in some rural communities of Trabzon, Turkey, this article provides insights about the diversity of Islamic pieties and their relations to religious norms. An exploration of everyday Islamic practices in the area demonstrates how piety can take peculiar forms within which norms are both publicly and socially upheld and yet also hollowed out. Among Muslim men of ‘the Valley’ in Trabzon, piety emerges as an aggregate of reiterative practices exterior to the pious self. Highlighting the aestheticised and ritualised state of these engagements with Islam in the Turkish context allows discussion of the relationships among practices of piety, pious subjectivities, and ethics.
... Hay varios motivos para rechazar una lectura como la de Horton; entre otros, el de que el llamado relativismo primitivo no es solo intercultural, sino intracultural y 'auto cultural' , y que él no exprime ni tolerancia, ni indiferencia, sino exterioridad absoluta a la idea cripto-teológica de 'cultura' como conjunto de creencias (Tooker, 1992;Viveiros de Castro, 1993). El motivo principal entre tanto está perfectamente prefigurado en los comentarios de Gow, a saber, que ésta idea del "parroquialismo" traduce el debate de Santa Clara en los términos de la posición de la profesora, con su universalismo natural y 33 Y en efecto, la réplica de la mujer Piro es idéntica a una observación de los Zande, consignada en el libro que es la biblia de los antropólogos de la persuasión de Horton: "Una vez escuché un Zande decir de nosotros: tal vez allá en el país de ellos las personas no sean asesinadas por brujos, pero aquí sí lo son" (Evans Pritchard, 1978:274). ...
This article attempts to extract the theoretical implications arising from the fact that anthropology not only studies relations, but that the knowledge it produces in the process is itself a relation. It therefore proposes an image of anthropology as an activity founded on the premise that the procedures characteristic of the discipline are conceptually of the same order as those it investigates. Among these implications is the rejection of the contemporary notion that each culture or society embodies a specific solution to a generic problem, filling a universal form (the anthropological concept) with a particular content (the native conceptions). Much the opposite: the image proposed here suggests that the problems themselves are radically heterogenic, and that the anthropologist cannot know beforehand what these will be.
... In 2013 and 2014, for the first time, two boys from Lak Sip Ha entered the wad of Chansavang as novices. Once again, this indicated not so much a replacement of one cosmology by another, but rather a reorientation toward different, but co-existing socio-cosmic horizons, motivated by local reasoning (e.g., Kammerer 1990;Tooker 1992). Both boys were not sent as agents of conversion, but for reasons of health and education. ...
As in many Southeast Asian societies, the religious landscape of Laos is structured by the difference of a world religion and local and personalized relations often called animism. This chapter deals with the dynamics between Buddhism and what is vernacularly called spirit religion (sadsana phi) among Jru’ (Loven). It focuses on two villages, one that identifies mostly with Jru’ ritual and one where people identify as practicing both Buddhism and spirit religion. Both, however, have integrated elements of Buddhist and Lao ritual in village ritual life. The spread of Buddhism has close connections with the shift from swidden agriculture to coffee plantations in this region. This raises the question how a transcultural religion like Buddhism affects the non-human agents of local ritual and value systems.
... The practice happened to different extents in such diverse ethnic groups as the Igbo and Ijaw of Nigeria (Leis 1965;Milner 2000;Bastian 2001), the Efik of Nigeria and Cameroon (Livingstone 2012), the Kikuyu of Kenya (Milner 2000), the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert (Milner 2000;Turner 2008), the Maidu of Northern California (Riddell 1978), the Khoikhoi of South Africa (who killed female twins Milner 2000), the Akha of northern Thailand, where giving birth to twins was the "greatest calamity" (Tooker 1992), and the Amhara of Ethiopia (who used to exposed twins, Granzberg 1973;Milner 2000). ...
Historically, some societies around the world killed newborn twins, though the practice was forsaken in the early twentieth century. Anthropologists have proposed different theses: (1) the delivery of twins occurred when the mother cheated on her husband, or committed a great sin, and killing the twins was the penalty, (2) twin-killing was done to assert that human beings were different from animals among which multiple births in the same delivery were seen, (3) twins brought a dilemma to the kinship structure of societies and to cope with it different rules were adopted, twin-killing being the extreme one, (4) twin-killing was a means to face resource stress. We argue that although those interpretations are useful, we can improve the understanding of that phenomenon by adding an identity economics model, where twins are a taboo. Identity economics helps us explain the persistence of the practice and its eventual decline. We make our case with examples from the Igbo of Nigeria.
... This is largely due to the pressure they sustain from the mainstream Han-Chinese society. As in many Southeast Asian tribal societies that seek to maintain an identity apart from the dominant culture by converting to Christianity [Tapp 1989;Kammerer 1990;Tooker 1992;Keyes 1993;Kipp 1995;Hefner 1998], the Bunun view Christianity as an emblem of distinction that helps them maintain a boundary between themselves and the Han- will despair over their loss, it is not an obligation to cry, and there is no "emotional division of labor" ...
... 36 There are a number of good grounds to resist readings such as Horton's. Among others, one reason is that so-called primitive relativism is not only intercultural, but also intracultural and even "auto-cultural," and, to boot, expresses neither tolerance nor indifference, but rather an absolute departure from the crypto-theological idea of "culture" as a set of beliefs (Tooker 1992;Viveiros de Castro 1993). The main reason to resist such readings, however, is perfectly prefigured in Gow's own comments, namely, that the idea of "parochialism" translates the Santa Clara debate into the terms of the teacher's position, with her natural universalism and (more or less tolerant) cultural particularism. ...
... Se o termo "religião" é problemático não menos o é "crença". Tooker (1992), abordando os akha do leste da Birmânia, fala antes em "costume" ou "tradição" e da obrigatoriedade de "carregar" os espíritos, ao invés de "acreditar" na sua existência. Apesar da distância geográfica e não querendo cair em "universais culturais", tal perceção encontramo-la no imaginário yorùbá. ...
This paper aims to focus on the concept of religion and its conceptual implications to the observation of African religions taking the Yorùbá religious attitudes and beliefs, as well as candomblés, as case studies. It is our intention to trace a new itinerary in the conceptualization of African religious experiences taking the native structures as the scenery for theory. Having present the idea that religion in those contexts is made, it is intended to present alternative categories to the classic monotheism, polytheism and pantheon.
... A partir daí é interessante pensar o significado, para os ameríndios, daquilo que costumamos chamar de tradição. Em um artigo sobre o conceito de tradição entre os Akha (Birmânia/Mianmar), Tooker (1992) observa que para eles o termo zán, que significa "modo de vida", "modo de fazer as coisas", "costumes", "tradição", caracteriza-se como um conjunto de práticas, e é concebido como uma carga que se leva em um cesto. O idioma da tradição é, portanto, "exteriorizante", e se opõe à nossa idéia de tradição como um conjunto de valores internalizados, aos quais se adere, como disse Viveiros de Castro (1992, p. 25), como a um sistema de crenças, e que tem relação com uma concepção "teológica" da cultura que nos é própria. ...
... 3. In contrast, Tooker (1992) argues that the religious precepts and rituals of the Akha of Thailand are simply formal public expressions of the Akha's externalized collective identity, much like their distinctive headdresses, clothing style, posture, house structure, spatial orientation, and so on. The Akha are not believers; they are performers. ...
In this article, I contrast the ideal-typical models for the verification of belief proposed by Max Weber (external and meaning-centered) and Emile Durkheim (internal and emotional). I then put forward a continuum of types of belief legitimization based on these models and place the articles in this collection within this framework to demonstrate the complex interplay between modes of belief corroboration and to provide a theoretical basis for making cross-cultural comparisons of belief maintenance.
... Among the Zambian Christians of Kirsch's research, belief was not prior to or definitive of an identity subsequently acted out, but rather belief itself 'had a certain performative power directed at "the world outside"'. Likewise, Deborah Tooker (1992;Rhum and Tooker, 1993), writing about Christian Akha peoples in Thailand, notes that upon conversion, there is not a corresponding 'conversion' of the category of belief. Belief, she notes, remains a characteristic of 'exteriority' rather than an internalized state of assent. ...
Looking at Christian identity in terms of standpoint theory, this article takes up the argument introduced by Susan Friend Harding more than 10 years ago that Christianity and Christians are stigmatized within anthropology as a `repugnant cultural other'. Drawing from my own fieldwork in the Philippines and other recent work on Christianity, I argue that Christianity is a subject position analogous to other committed subject positions outside androcentric, enlightenment modernity (e.g. feminism). As such, the Christian voice should be welcomed and encouraged in the academy as a valuable ethnographic perspective.
... In outlining a Bidayuh model of Bidayuh-ness, so to speak, I have tried to generate an alternative conceptualisation of one indigenous minority's relationship with the Malaysian state. In this, my paper falls within the same ethnographic scope as an already rich and diverse literature on the relationship between dominant political majorities and 'hinterland minorities' in Southeast Asia (e.g., Benjamin & Chou 2003;Kahn 1992;Kammerer 1990;Keyes 1996;Kipp 1993;Rosaldo 2003;Schiller 1997;Tooker 1992;Tsing 1993;Winzeler 1997). At the same time, I have had a reflexive interest in highlighting an interpretative problem arising from the meta-analytical framework that underpins much of the literature. ...
This article explores conceptions of the Malaysian ethnic system from the perspective of certain Bidayuhs, an indigenous group of Sarawak, Borneo. Recent scholarship has highlighted the ‘fluid’ and ‘shifting’ nature of Malay identity; but less attention has been paid to how ethnic minorities in the region depict Malayness. I suggest that for many Bidayuhs, Malay-ness is marked by an inescapable flxity which stifies a fluidity that they value as intrinsic to Bidayuh-ness and other aspects of life. Moreover, this sense of flxity has been mapped onto their conceptions of the (Malay-dominated) Malaysian ethnic system, in which they are inescapably entangled. The article investigates some of the consequent tensions arising from Bidayuh (dis)engagements with Malaysia's ethnic ‘flxity’, while tracing certain trends and changes in this relationship.
Researching into the oral tradition of the central part of Pelješac peninsula, the authors recorded a number of beliefs and vows. The present paper is an analysis of a part of the collected material. The first part of the analysis presents beliefs, and the second one vows related to the life cycle of an individual in the traditional culture, connected to the annual calendar of rural communities in the central part of Pelješac. The main purpose of the paper is to provide a detailed description of the local speech patterns from Kuna, Pijavičino, and Potomje, on the basis of traditional storytelling that can be heard from native speakers, which are often a reflection of the Mediterranean-Balkan cultural environment. Themes and motifs reveal the pre-Christian and Christian roots as well.
This study presents an analysis of the underlying factors which affect health communication in female hepatitis patients in Baluchistan. Qualitative research approach has been employed to carefully study the condition of patients having chronic diseases. Purposive sampling technique has been adopted wherein in-depth interviews were conducted with 15 physicians stationed in three public sector hospitals in Quetta. For data analysis, thematic analysis technique was employed. Based on the analysis, this study deduces that better health outcomes are dependent on health communication at individual, organizational and societal level. The study further identifies that health literacy, health behavior, cultural competence, gender, and women perception of diseases affect health communication of female hepatitis patients. The findings of the research suggest that the health communication strategies should be effectively utilized for promoting proper health communication and propagating preventive health awareness. The study further recommends that the academia should step forward to seek the attention of stakeholders to this particular issue. The results of the study have potential implications to strengthen the whole health care system by considering the communicative aspect of public health.
In this article, I argue that the study of belief in anthropology generally connotes an “either/or” dichotomy—either one believes something or one does not—which exceeds the concept of belief and stems from monotheistic and totalizing biases rampant throughout the discipline. Thus, I take up John Mair's recent call to study cultures of belief in relation to cosmo- and pluriverse politics. Drawing on a Pali philosophical lineage, I list overlapping ways people invoke belief and believing in northern Thailand. I then argue that a local kaleidoscopic theory of mind, in step with this logic of listing, can provide inroads to patterns, modes, and styles of belief inaccessible within prevailing anthropological paradigms. By playing with academic form as well as the somewhat out of fashion concept of belief, I highlight a particular sense of karmic contingency and related assumptions about multiplicity—of perspectives and of realities. This study of belief in turn serves at once to underscore pluralities as experienced in northern Thai contexts, to suggest such possibilities elsewhere, and to draw attention to the consequential limitations placed on conceptual landscapes by the underlying ontological assumptions of dominant forms of western knowledge production.
Kri people in central Laos traditionally engage in ‘heavy’ practices, including a stipulation that houses must be relocated and the flooring discarded upon a death in the family. Such ‘heavy’ practices are considered ‘real Kri’, and they are not adhered to by those who identify as Kri Phòòngq. This article examines the adoption of more enduring housing construction among the Kri, and the dynamics of ethnic identity implied by the dilemmas raised for individuals and families who must choose between (a) maintaining the heavy life of real Kri, (b) innovating new and less heavy solutions, or (c) changing identity entirely. L'insoutenable lourdeur d’être kri : construction de maisons et transformation ethnolinguistique dans les hautes‐terres du Laos Résumé Les kri dans le centre du Laos se livrent traditionnellement à des pratiques « lourdes ». Ils doivent notamment, quand un décès se produit dans une famille, déplacer sa maison et en jeter le plancher. Ces pratiques « lourdes » sont considérées comme « vraiment kri » et ceux qui s'identifient comme Kri Phòòngq n'y adhèrent pas. Le présent article examine l'adoption par les Kris de constructions plus durables pour leurs maisons et la dynamique de l'identité ethnique qu'implique le dilemme soulevé pour les individus et leurs familles, qui doivent choisir entre (a) perpétuer la vie lourde des vrais Kris, (b) inventer de nouvelles solutions moins lourdes et (c) changer complètement d'identité.
Recent initiatives by Stein, Flynn, Conrad, and others have promoted ‘unbelief’ as a replacement, an ‘umbrella term,’ for concepts like atheism, secularism, and irreligion. In this essay I show that unbelief as it is currently construed cannot serve this function: it is simultaneously too broad (embracing not only irreligion but heterodox religious belief) and too narrow (focusing on religious belief to the exclusion of other types of belief), and it commits a taxonomic error of equating unbelief with categories above and below its level. However, I also argue that, once reformed and disciplined, unbelief is a valuable and essential tool, and I provide some resources and models for a future Unbelief Studies in the Credition Research Project and the literature on agnotology, as well as ethnographical material questioning the cross-cultural applicability of belief and unbelief. Finally, I charge Unbelief Studies with the mission not only to analyze belief but to criticize and ultimately banish it as a bad mental and linguistic habit that perpetuates mistakes and leaves individuals vulnerable to further faults while eroding social trust and facticity itself.
The revised third edition of the textbook, with a theme of gender and a new chapter on religion and health/medicine
Recent field research into traditional beliefs in supernatural beings (werewolves, fairies, witches, and mòras) among the inhabitants of the Dalmatian hinterland has shown that such beliefs are still present within certain groups. This fact opens up a possibility of asking present-day informants different kinds of questions, not often asked in folkloristic and ethnological research conducted in these regions. First and foremost, these refer to the question of what the informants themselves think about believing in supernatural beings, why people believe in them and talk about them. Thus in this paper there will be no talk about the nature, doings and names of supernatural beings or narrative forms they occupy, but about the notions and explanations of the very informants. Through informants’ own interpretations and additional data about them were gathered on the basis of a modified questionnaire we will be able to better understand the reality of the informant’s relationship toward believing in supernatural beings.
This article challenges the common assumption that the framework of “syncretism” (in terms of hybridity or blending) neatly characterizes pluralist religious practices. My case study from coastal Kenya suggests that in some communities, religious pluralism may preserve discontinuity between loci of religious power, a model I call “polyontologism.”
This article explores how notions of spiritual warfare among Pentecostals/charismatics in south-central Tanzania are entangled with popular Islamic spiritologies from the coastal areas, especially Islamic spirits known as majini. Majini have become incorporated into contemporary shared understandings of witchcraft and traditional healing, contributing to a perceived modernization of witchcraft.
The ethnology of the Wari' (in the southern Amazonian area of Brazil) are used to show how a Native American society understands Christianity and how missionaries, teachings and practices are interpreted in the light of the native culture's presuppositions. Catholic and Protestant missionary activities are comparatively analyzed in order to emphasize the unexpected results wrought by their ideologies.
In the late 1980s, after decades of refusal, the Forest Tobelo foragers of northeastern Halmahera, Indonesia, converted to Christianity. The version of Christianity they accepted was not the one offered (or imposed) by coastal Tobelo-speaking communities with whom they share kinship and affinal ties, but was brought to the region by the American-based New Tribes Mission. This essay examines the factors and motivations behind this change, and offers an explanation that takes into account local histories, larger political and economic changes, such as deforestation and land encroachment, and the rarely examined topic of missionary methodologies. The Forest Tobelo decision to convert is best understood as an attempt to maintain their distinct identity from coastal communities with whom they have a long history of poor relations; the methods used by the New Tribes Mission made conversion an attractive option at that time.
О que signified tornar-se Outro ? Xamanismo e contato interetnico na Amazonia brasileira Atraves da analise da etnografia wari' (Amazonia Meridional), justaposta a outros materiais etnograficos das terras baixas sul-americanas, pretende-se mostrar que о idioma da corporali- dade, central para о entendimento da capacidade do xamâ de mudar de identidade, transformando-se em animal, e essencial para se pensar, no contexto amerindio, a experiencia do mundo dos Brancos. Palavras-chave : xamanismo, Amazonia, tradicao, historia, contato interetnico, perspectivismo. What does it mean to become an other ? Shamanism and interethnic contact in Brazilian Amazonia Juxtaposing an analysis of Wari' ethnography (southern Amazonia) with other ethnogra phic material from the South American Lowlands, this paper seeks to show how the idiom of corporality is both central to the understanding of the shaman's capacity to change identity — to transform into an animal — and essential to conceptualizing the Amerindian experience of the world of the Whites.
La pregnance en Belgique d'un systeme d'identites exclusives (on est soit flamand, soit wallon) ne laisse pas place a des identites mixtes. Si le Vlaams Blok a si bien reussi sa percee en Flandre et meme a Bruxelles, c'est qu'il epouse cette conception tres generalement admise meme chez ses adversaires antiracistes, qui se manifeste notamment par une exigence de conformisme : appartenir est une orthopraxie. Le trait du "programme" du Vlaams Blok qui lui vaut ses plus grands succes, l'islamophobie, se nourrit en outre du fait que, l'islam n'etant pas un "pilier" de la societe belge consociationnelle, les musulmans sont en Belgique des etrangers absolus.
The Wari, speakers of a Txapakura language living in the west of Rondônia state, Brazil, have been in close contact with fundamentalist Protestant missionaries of the New Tribes Mission for five decades. Using myth as a comparative framework, this article looks to understand conversion to Christianity as a process of adopting the enemys perspective, related to the Wari attempt to stabilize their position as humans. It also aims to contribute to the contemporary debate between anthropologists and scholars of religion over the integrity of Christianity as it propagates around the world by showing that the dichotomy between continuity and rupture makes no sense to peoples like the Wari and other Amerindians whose culture is reproduced through successive alterations involving the transformation into an other and the acquisition of this other perspective. The adoption of Christianity as something new and external does not contradict the assertion of a continuity between this religion and native culture.
This study will focus on the differences in the way that Roman Paganism and Christianity organize systems of beliefs. It rejects the theory that "beliefs" have no place in the Roman religion, but stresses the differences between Christian orthodoxy, in which mandatory dogmas define group identity, and the essentially polythetic nature of Roman religious organization, in which incompatible beliefs could exist simultaneously in the community without conflict. In explaining how such beliefs could coexist in Rome, the study emphasizes three main conceptual mechanisms: (1) polymorphism, the idea that gods could have multiple identities with incompatible attributes, (2) orthopraxy, the focus upon standardized ritual rather than standardized belief, and (3) pietas, the Roman ideal of reciprocal obligation, which was flexible enough to allow Romans to maintain relationships simultaneously with multiple gods at varying levels of personal commitment. © 2003 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Women play a peculiar role in tourism. In general, it is more difficult for women to access the profits coming from tourism. This is often due to social expectations regarding gender as well as social restrictions on women, which exist in the countries themselves.In the case of a sustainable tourism project working with the Akha, an ethnic minority in Northern Laos, the gender question was raised, but experts were rather unsure of how best to integrate women actively in the project. Those who had a stake in the discussion felt as if giving a more active role to women from an ethnic minority would disturb the traditional image of the culture and traditional gender roles which tourists long for. Ethnic women in Laos are thought to represent the traditional lifestyle, and to subsist in more passive roles rather than participating actively. The concerns surrounding cultural and social change were so strong that ethnic minority women, who were already benefiting from tourism through the selling of souvenirs, were excluded from sustainable tourism projects.The concepts of cultural conservation, rather present in the scientific and international debate about sustainable tourism, are, in this case, conflicting with the interests of ethnic minority women by limiting their involvement in such projects. The article argues that only if the question of gender equality is taken more seriously can these conflicts between global ideas and local interests, as well as possible ways to resolve them, become clear and understandable.
JOHN BOWEN reviews key issues and developments in his state-of-the-field article on Southeast Asian anthropology. Although much of the work in the field shares an interest in culture, the emphases have shifted recently, away from an earlier preoccupation with studying culture through its "public forms" and their "intrinsic" meanings to a concern with interpreting the meanings they acquire and possess for different sets of actors. Through his extensive survey of the literature, Bowen shows that anthropologists have turned their attention away from face-to-face communities to scrutinize how people understand and interpret their roles and experiences in a changing world, where their lives are increasingly shaped by a variety of institutions ranging from state to school to mosque. "Rather than analyzing culture into intrinsically meaningful symbols and meanings," Bowen believes, "Southeast Asianists have come to see culture as a history of people interpreting public forms."
In this article, I demonstrate that notions of collective identity among the Akha of Northern Thailand have shifted in recent history from a comprehensive, holistic form to a compartmentalized form. I contrast forms of collective (Akha) identity during the period of my initial fieldwork (1982-1985) with forms emerging post-1985 through 1998, a time period characterized by increasing nation-state and capitalist penetration. This recent shift is placed within a broader, long-term historical context of the shifting politics of identity in upland/lowland relations. A comprehensive, holistic form of collective identity was historically developed by the Akha as a protective and organizational complex under conditions of dispersion, orality, local autonomy and unequal power relations with outside, lowland (especially Tai) groups. Thus recent critiques of holistic, bounded approaches to culture need to take into account the fact that such forms may be produced by native actors, both as concepts and as lived realities. This form, which was defined as permeating multiple dimensions of everyday life, is being replaced by a form in which it is acceptable to compartmentalize Akha identity as an "ethnic" component that is relegated to special occasions and social domains. These two different forms of identity have different implications for the way the Akha construct and relate to others (non-Akha). Such a change raises comparative questions concerning the creative formation of and limits on modern forms of collective identity. Both new tensions and new accommodative potential between ethnic groups arise under these new conditions.
This article explores sexuality and its role in cultural reproduction amongst Akha, a minority group living in the mountainous reaches of southwest China, northern Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Burma. For many minority peoples in the region sexuality has been a marker of cultural difference within trajectories of nationalist assimilation. In northwest Laos, Akha sexuality is currently a focusof intense interest as infrastructure development, increased interactions with lowland populations, and targeted state and donor-funded health programs are dramatically altering Akha lifestyles. Whether by conscious design to intervene insexual lives, or through the numerous ways that affective domains merge withmaterial aspirations, social structures shaping Lao Akha sexuality are being “re-formed” through engagement in processes of modernisation. As a result, sexuality remains central to ongoing ethnic marginalisation and evolving vulnerability to health threats.
DEBORAH TOOKER interrogates models of premodern Southeast Asian political systems, specifically mandala and other spatialized concepts associated with the `cosmic polity,' by arguing that they are constructed from the viewpoint of elite sources and the center. Consequently, they "reaffirm existing power structures." By drawing on present-day ethnographic fieldwork-namely, her work on the Akha, a tribal upland ethnic minority living along the Thai-Burmese border-she demonstrates that `cosmic polity' approaches are constructed on an "encompassment model of hierarchy" and therefore overlook the possibility of contestations occurring within that hierarchy. Indeed, her study of the Akha and their specific notions of a supralocal political unit (myan), village polity, and household, shows that spatial codes are deployed differently in different contexts. As well as highlighting the links between spatial relations and power relations, her fieldwork leads her to emphasize the importance of understanding the "interrelationships between societies as parts of larger political-economic systems." Thus, she argues for a more practice-based approach to the understanding of spatiopolitical models.
Twenty-five years ago, in 1970, when the first volume of the Journal of South-East Asian Studies made its appearance, I was living in a rather remote mountain village in Phrao district, northern Thailand, about to complete a four-year field project with the Lahu Nyi. I was one of close to a dozen social and cultural anthropologists, at various stages in their professional careers from Ph.D. candidates (such as myself) to seasoned professionals (like the late Bill Geddes), at work among Thailand's so-called “northern hill tribes”. The small expatriate community in the charming Chiang Mai of those days readily joked about “the anthropologist behind every bush in the northern hills”. In fact there were good reasons for this heavy concentration of anthropological research at that time. The 1960s were perhaps the halcyon days for social and cultural anthropology in the Western academy; naturally this happy situation was reflected in the numbers of doctoral candidates proceeding to the field. Moreover, within the mainland Southeast Asia of that time, only Thailand provided academic researchers with relatively easy and more-or-less safe access to its mountain peoples.
How to reconcile belief in God with the worldview generated by modern science is a concern for those who see such belief as the essence of religion. Some religious traditions emphasize correct behavior, including observance of ritual, more than belief. Others stress individual pursuit of inner tranquility without prescribing particular beliefs or rituals by which that is to be achieved. Theological issues relating to “the God question in an age of science” are relevant to Christians, whose religious emphasis is on right belief as necessary to personal salvation; but science does not raise such issues for religion generally.
In a major revision of my earlier theoretical work on religion, I attempt to identify and connect the basic micro elements and processes underlying religious expression. I show that all primary aspects of religion—belief, emotion, ritual, prayer, sacrifice, mysticism, and miracle—can be understood on the basis of exchange relations between humans and supernatural beings. Although I utilize a cognitive definition of religion, this new version of the theory is especially concerned with the emotional and expressive aspects of religion. Along the way I also clarify the difference between religion and magic and this sets the stage for explaining the conditions under which religion (but not magic) can require extended and exclusive exchange relations between humans and the gods, thus enabling some religions to sustain stable organizations based on a lay membership.
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