In thinking about area studies, we need to recognize that histories produce geographies and not vice versa. We must get away from the notion that there is some kind of spatial landscape against which time writes its story. Instead, it is historical agents, institutions, actors, powers that make the geography. (Appadurai 2010: 9)

The historical production of a cultural complex

The point of this chapter is to look at how the set of spatial practices discussed in this book is part of what I call a ‘nonmodern cultural complex’ that developed historically and in a multi-ethnic context of uneven power relationships. I use the term of a ‘nonmodern cultural complex’ both because this complex has a remarkable distribution across Akha groups and because it seems to have had a long history of continuity, possibly over six or seven centuries. The history of the Akha prior to this century is not well known and future findings may indicate that I am only projecting a continuity. However, I need to go on existing evidence, evidence which does seem to indicate a long history of continuity. This is not to say that there have been no variations in this complex over time. In line with recent discussions (see Gupta & Ferguson 1997a) questioning the naturalization of the ‘culture’ concept, we need to problematize this continuity and see it as arising historically and being reproduced over time. So how did this cultural complex come about?

The literature concerning the differential definitions of ‘minorities’, ‘ethnic groups’, etc. in different historical and intergroup contexts (Lehman, Jonsson, O’Connor) must be taken into account. Jonsson (2001a), for example, calls for an historical periodization of upland/lowland relations and changes in the politics of difference (and thus ethnic identity) over time in the Southeast Asian mainland, in order to illustrate that ethnic identities are not fixed over time. The periods he constructs (along with their differential identity politics for uplands and lowlands) are: pre-colonial/tributary, colonial, and nation-state. To this I would add a later ‘national’ period (see Tooker 2004), more influenced by global discourses on the politics of difference which contrasts with the initial nationalist period.