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.