Handbuch der Orientalistik = Handbook of Oriental Studies. Abt. 3, South-East Asia. Bd. 18, Social dynamics in the Highlands of Southeast Asia: reconsidering Political systems of Highland Burma by E.R. Leach

383 Pages·2007·2.669 MB·English

by  Robinne, François;Sadan, Mandy;Leach, Edmund Ronald

Social Dynamics in the
Highlands of Southeast Asia
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Handbook of Oriental Studies
Handbuch der Orientalistik
Section Three
Southeast Asia
Edited by
V. Lieberman
M. C. Ricklefs
VOLUME 18
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Social Dynamics in the
Highlands of Southeast Asia
Reconsidering Political Systems of Highland Burma
by E. R. Leach
Edited by
François Robinne and Mandy Sadan
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2007
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On the cover : Rukyen Palaung Woman (Ta-An), Northern Shan State. Photograph by
François Robinne
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
ISSN 0169-9571
ISBN 978 90 04 16034 7
© Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated,
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Danvers, MA 01923, USA.
Fees are subject to change.
printed in the netherlands
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For my father, with love, respect and gratitude
M.S.
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Measuring a gong offered by the dama (wife takers) to the mayu (wife givers) during
a Jinghpaw wedding ceremony at Myitkyina, Kachin State. Photograph by Fran(cid:2)ois
Robinne
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CONTENTS
Preface ......................................................................................... ix
François Robinne and Mandy Sadan
List of Contributors .................................................................... xvii
Introduction: Notes on Edmund Leach’s analysis of Kachin
society and its further applications ......................................... xxi
F. K. L. Chit Hlaing (F. K. Lehman)
Part One
Historical Contexts of E. R. Leach’s Fieldwork
The biographical origins of Political Systems of Highland Burma ... 3
Robert Anderson
On the continuing relevance of E. R. Leach’s Political Systems
of Highland Burma to Kachin Studies ..................................... 31
Maran La Raw
Translating Gumlau: History, the ‘Kachin’ and Edmund
Leach ....................................................................................... 67
Mandy Sadan
Part Two
Comparative Approaches in Assam and Laos
Politico-ritual variations on the Assamese fringes: Do social
systems exist? ........................................................................... 91
Philippe Ramirez
Naga ethnography and Leach’s oscillatory model of gumsa
and gumlao ............................................................................... 109
Pascal Bouchery
Interethnic systems and localized identities: The Khmu
subgroups (tmoy) in North-West Laos ..................................... 127
Olivier Evrard
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viii contents
From Kettledrums to Coins: Social transformation and the
(cid:2) ow of valuables in Northern Laos ....................................... 161
Guido Sprenger
Political hierarchical processes among some highlanders
of Laos .................................................................................... 187
Vanina Bouté
Part Three
The Kachin Subgroups
Rethinking Kachin wealth ownership ........................................ 211
Ho Ts’ui-p’ing
The Missing Share: The ritual language of sharing as a
‘total social fact’ in the eastern Himalayas (northwest
Yunnan, China) ....................................................................... 257
Stéphane Gros
Transethnic social space of clans and lineages: A discussion of
Leach’s concept of common ritual language ......................... 283
François Robinne
Postscript: Reconsidering the dynamics of ethnicity through
Foucault’s concept of ‘spaces of dispersion’ .......................... 299
François Robinne and Mandy Sadan
Bibliography ................................................................................ 309
Index ........................................................................................... 325
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PREFACE
François Robinne and Mandy Sadan
This volume originated from a panel held to mark the (cid:3) ftieth anniver-
sary of the publication of Edmund Leach’s classic study Political Systems
of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure (1954), which was
organised for the EUROSEAS Conference held at the Sorbonne Univer-
sity, Paris, in September 2004. The (cid:3) ftieth anniversary, in combination
with the location of the conference in France, presented a timely oppor-
tunity both to reconsider the signi(cid:3) cance of Leach’s seminal text as well
as to continue his original scheme of making the work an engagement
between Anglophone and Francophone anthropology (which, in Leach’s
case, meant an engagement with Lévi-Strauss in particular). However,
we are delighted that we have been able to include contributions in
this volume that succeed in breaking down those limiting parameters
of discourse and which incorporate other spatial, relational, discursive
and cognitive models of ‘Kachin’ than Leach was able to present. All
of the papers presented at the conference have been included in this
volume, with two additional contributions from Vanina Bouté and
Guido Sprenger. The Introduction by U Chit Hlaing (Professor F. K.
Lehman) has been developed from comments that were made on the
day in the key role that he played as Discussant. For ease of reference,
Leach’s work is referred to as Political Systems throughout.
The (cid:3) eldwork underpinning Political Systems was begun as World War
II approached, and was continued in its midst. The post-war environ-
ment in the Kachin region of northern Burma, however, was not ame-
nable to the pursuit of academic research by Western anthropologists
and, after publication, Edmund Leach was largely forced to divert his
interests to other places and anthropological subjects (Anderson, this
volume). Nonetheless, Leach’s name was established by the publication
of Political Systems and its impact and implications extended far beyond
the Kachin case-study at its core. Indeed, the theoretical perspectives
of the work have proved to be signi(cid:3) cant in the development of Social
Anthropology in the longer term, not least through Leach’s analysis of
social change considered through the articulation of structural variation
and relational dynamics. The contributions that Leach’s work has made
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x françois robinne and mandy sadan
to Southeast Asian Studies, to Social Anthropology, and to theories of
the relationship between Anthropology, History and Ethnicity have
been extensive. Indeed, it is hard to think of other, similar texts that
might warrant such an intensive reconsideration in the form of confer-
ence panels and published volumes after (cid:3) fty years. The fact that such
an exercise has proved to be so useful after such a time attests to the
ongoing signi(cid:3) cance of Leach’s work.
However, the value of this reconsideration arises from the fact that,
whilst the text remains a standard of university reading lists and aca-
demic bibliographies to this day, some of the more contentious aspects
of Political Systems (which are detailed fully in the chapters to follow)
are as well known as its groundbreaking ideas on relational identities.
Indeed, two generations of students can attest to the fact that Political
Systems is a perennially dif(cid:3) cult work to critique. Up to now, most criti-
cism of Political Systems has been conducted at an abstracted theoreti-
cal level in the absence of empirical (cid:3) eldwork data from the Kachin
region. Fifty years after publication, however, new research has been
conducted in a number of settings related directly to the Kachin social
environment, as well as with other ‘highland’ communities in Southeast
Asia, the (cid:3) ndings of which are of pertinence to some of Leach’s central
ideas. These developments make a reconsideration of Political Systems at
this time a relevant and useful exercise, of bene(cid:3) t to our understand-
ing of Historical Anthropology in general and Southeast Asian Studies
in particular. It is intended that this volume will assist the process of
opening up Leach’s text to important new readings on issues such as
social dynamics and identity, postcolonial studies, the politics and ethics
of (cid:3) eldwork and of community representation, amongst others.
In writing Political Systems Leach hoped to challenge a number of
theoretical approaches that were then current in British Social Anthro-
pology. He hoped to contrast his work with the essentialist approach
still prevailing in much academic writing originating from the colonial
sphere; he also established a critical distance from Durkheim and
Malinowski and ideas of the duality of the sacred and the profane.
Most signi(cid:3) cantly, however, he hoped to challenge the claims of struc-
turalism as a universal and a-temporal model by positioning Political
Systems theoretically around the concept of “unstable equilibrium”. Yet,
paradoxically, the strength of this conceptual approach appears also to
be its greatest weakness and has resulted in a highly ambiguous book
in which the data and the theory seem especially ill at ease with each
other. Indeed, one might with justi(cid:3) cation accuse Leach of reducing
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