Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Maps, Tables, Figures and Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Akha Transcription, Akha Pronunciation Guide, and CAW Comparison chart
- 1 Bearings
- 2 Moving Through History
- 3 Space and the Flow of Life
- 4 Spatializing the Upland Village Polity and its Alter, the Lowland Muang
- 5 Space and Fertility in House and Field
- 6 Chanting to Produce the Inside and Outside
- 7 Rethinking the Cosmic Polity
- 8 Space, Life, and Identity
- Appendix A Spirit Chanting of the Inside: Types of Ceremonies
- Appendix B Spirit Chanting of the Outside: Types of Ceremonies
- Akha Glossary
- Notes
- List of References
- English Language Index
- Akha Language Index
- Biographical Note about the Author
- Publications Series
5 - Space and Fertility in House and Field
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Maps, Tables, Figures and Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Akha Transcription, Akha Pronunciation Guide, and CAW Comparison chart
- 1 Bearings
- 2 Moving Through History
- 3 Space and the Flow of Life
- 4 Spatializing the Upland Village Polity and its Alter, the Lowland Muang
- 5 Space and Fertility in House and Field
- 6 Chanting to Produce the Inside and Outside
- 7 Rethinking the Cosmic Polity
- 8 Space, Life, and Identity
- Appendix A Spirit Chanting of the Inside: Types of Ceremonies
- Appendix B Spirit Chanting of the Outside: Types of Ceremonies
- Akha Glossary
- Notes
- List of References
- English Language Index
- Akha Language Index
- Biographical Note about the Author
- Publications Series
Summary
Case story: When the unmarried daughter in the family with whom I resided became pregnant, she was forced out of the house before the baby was born. The family arranged for a pickup truck to come and pick her up one morning to drop her off in the lowlands. ‘I don't care if she becomes a prostitute down there’, said her mother, ‘or she can be a servant’. As she was about to alight the truck, she blurted out the name of the (Akha) father, who lived in the village. A wedding was arranged shortly after.
Introduction
In this chapter, we see that spatial practices and patterns in the construction of the village have parallels in the construction of fields and households. While some of these practices serve to incorporate the household into the village, others allow the household (and its fields) to have an independent access to potency and fertility (through its patrilineal ancestral line), and thus resistance to full incorporation in the village. This gives the household a degree of autonomy that articulates with an egalitarian ethos. Thus, ‘spatial tactics’ are not monolithic and are actively used in different contexts to produce different social domains and their associated identities and hierarchies.
The Akha household
The house has been recognized as a key social unit in Southeast Asia. Lévi-Strauss has gone so far as to coin the term ‘house societies’ (sociétés à maison) (1979, 1983a, 1983b, 1984, 1987, 1991) and a number of publications have arisen from this initial discussion (Macdonald 1987; Carsten & Hugh-Jones 1995a, among others). The house has been recognized as basic to the social structure of upland communities on the Southeast Asian mainland as well (see Kandre, Jones, etc.). In Akha society, too, the household has a degree of significance, resilience, independence and autonomy that sometimes makes one wonder why villages exist at all.
Jonsson (1999) has pointed to the need to take account of the historicity of the household and the variability of its prominence in upland society over time, depending on historical and political-economic circumstances. During the time period covered in this book, the household (njḿ dàn/íkán) was the basic kinship, ritual and economic unit in Akha society. It was the minimal segment of a patrilineage,1 below the level of a sublineage (pà) which may consist of several households.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Space and the Production of Cultural Difference among the Akha Prior to GlobalizationChanneling the Flow of Life, pp. 117 - 156Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2012