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Discarding the Basket: The Reinterpretation of Tradition by Akha Christians of Northern Thailand

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 August 2011

Cornelia Ann Kammerer
Cornelia Ann Kammerer
Affiliation:
Brandeis University
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Abstract

Protestant Akha highlanders of Northern Thailand held a Silver Jubilee in 1987 celebrating the initial conversions to Christianity twenty-five years earlier. The Akha-language translation of the passage from the Gospel of Matthew selected as the Jubilee's theme evokes the image of a laden basket from a pre-Christian folktale accounting for the differentiation of Akha from other ethnic groups, and the Protestant Akha used this traditional image to separate themselves from non-Christian Akha. This paper explores the transformation of a symbolic vehicle for interethnic differentiation into a vehicle for intraethnic differentiation. Use of this laden basket image is viewed as part of intraethnic dialogues of identity, which are themselves embedded in dialogues of identity between Christian as well as traditionalist members of the Akha tribal minority and Buddhist Thai, who are Thailand's dominant majority both politically and culturally.

Type
Symposium: Protestants and Tradition in Southeast Asia
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , September 1996 , pp. 320 - 333
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1996

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References

1 The Akha orthography used here follows Lewis's, PaulAkha-English Dictionary (Ithaca: Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program, Department of Asian Studies, Data Paper No. 70, 1968)Google Scholar and his Akha-English-Thai Dictionary (Chiang Rai, Thailand: Development and Agricultural Project for Akha [DAPA], 1989)Google Scholar. 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 See, for instance, Lehman, F.K., “Ethnic Categories in Burma and the Theory of Social Systems”, Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and Nations, Vol. 1, ed. Kunstadter, Peter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 97–98Google Scholar; Provencher, R., Mainland Southeast Asia: An Anthropological Perspective (Pacific Palisades, CA: Goodyear Publishing Company, 1975), p. 108Google Scholar; and Kammerer, C.A., “Customs and Christian Conversion among Akha Highlanders of Burma and Thailand”, American Ethnologist 17,2 (1990): 285CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Geusau, L. Alting von, “Dialectics of Akhazaη: The Interiorizations of a Perennial Minority Group”, Highlanders of Thailand, ed. McKinnon, J. and Bhruksasri, Wanat (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 246Google Scholar; Tribal Research Institute, Tribal Population Summary (Chiang Mai, Thailand, 1990)Google Scholar.

4 Official government census figures are 95 per cent and 97 per cent, respectively. See Keyes, C.F., Thailand: Buddhist Kingdom as Modern Nation-State (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987), pp. 14–15Google Scholar.

5 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.

6 L. Alting von Geusau, “Dialectics of Akhazan,”, p. 246.

7 Overseas Missionary Fellowship, “The Akha Church is Celebrating!”, East Asia's Millions 95,4 (1987): 78Google Scholar.

8 Nightingale, J., “Jubilee of Joy”, East Asia's Millions 95,4 (1987): 82Google Scholar; Nightingale, P., “The Akha Work”, App. I in Kuhn, I., Ascent to the Tribes: Pioneering in North Thailand (London: Overseas Missionary Fellowship [agents Lutterworth Press], 1968), p. 265Google Scholar.

9 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. Nagler, Alois (New Haven: Human Relations Area Files, 1970 [1947]), p. 3Google Scholar. 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.

10 Overseas Missionary Fellowship, “The Akha Church Is Celebrating!”, p. 80.

11 J. Nightingale, “Jubilee of Joy”, pp. 81–82.

12 Overseas Missionary Fellowship, “The Akha Church Is Celebrating!”, p. 79.

13 Nightingale, Jean, Without a Gate (Singapore: Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1990), p. 359Google Scholar.

14 Bible Society of Thailand, (Rangoon, no publisher, no date), p. 36.

15 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.

16 See Kammerer, C.A., “Gateway to the Akha World: Kinship, Ritual, and Community among Highlanders of Thailand” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1986)Google Scholar, especially pp. 62–67, and Kammerer, “Territorial Imperatives: Akha Ethnic Identity and Thailand's National Integration”, Ethnicities and Nations: Processes of lnterethnic Relations in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific, ed. Guidieri, R., Pellizzi, F. and Tambiah, S.J. (Houston: Rothko Chapel [distributed by University of Texas Press], 1988), pp. 268–71Google Scholar; and “Customs and Christian Conversion”, for additional discussions of this folktale and of customs (zah”). For discussions of zah” by other anthropologists see L. Alting von Geusau, “Dialectics of Akhazan” and Tooker, D.E., “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)Google Scholar, 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)Google Scholar.

17 A basket were included with other elements of traditional material culture in an outdoor museum on one side of the Jubilee grounds. Like these baskets, many of the items on show are essential to Akha traditional religion. Indeed, several reconstructed scenes of rituals of Akha zaȟ were also on display.

18 C.A. Kammerer, “Gateway to the Akha World”, pp. 316–26.

19 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 nonancestral 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. Eberhardt, Nancy (Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison, Monograph 4, Center of Southeast Asian Studies, 1988)Google Scholar 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).

20 This stanza contains a number of problems in the tonal markings; such errors and omissions, which are not uncommon in written Akha, do not seem to trouble readers. In the second and third lines, lû, which indicates that an action is continuous, should be . In line two, , a possessive, should be , and the verb for “to shoulder the carrying pole” should be Finally, in the third line, the term which means “with” should be rather than , and the inclusive term for “we” should be See Bible Society of Thailand, (no date), p. 36; see also Lewis, Akha-English Dictionary, pp. 16, 164, 188, 221, and 230.

21 Overseas Missionary Fellowship, “The Akha Church Is Celebrating!”, p. 78.

22 I am grateful to Paul Kratoska for calling this point to my attention.

23 For discussions of this point see C.A. Kammerer, “Gateway to the Akha World”, p. 269 and “Customs and Christian Conversion”, pp. 280–81.

24 For a detailed analysis of the political economy of poverty among Thailand's tribal minorities see Kammerer, C.A., Hutheesing, O. Klein, Maneeprasert, Ralana and Symonds, P.V., “Vulnerability to HIV Infection among Three Hilltribes in Northern Thailand”, in Culture and Sexual Risk: Anthropological Perspectives on AIDS, ed. Brummelhuis, H. ten and Herdt, G. (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers, 1995), pp. 53–75Google Scholar.