CORNELIA ANN KAMMERERâWomen's Studies, Brandeis University ... asymmetric alliance and political egalitarianism requires a kinship analysis that is.
descent, alliance, and political order among Akha
CORNELIA ANN KAMMERER—Women's Studies, Brandeis University
the anthropology of highland continental Southeast Asia The peoples of continental Southeast Asia are often characterized either as occupants of "the river valleys where they cultivate rice in irrigated fields" or as occupants of "the hills where they cultivate rice mainly by the slash and burn techniques of shifting cultivation" (Leach 1954:52). The "Valley People," such as the literate Buddhist Shan of Burma, are described by Leach as having "non-unilineal kinship organisation linked with charismatic despotism" (1960:51), and the "Hill People," such asthenonliterateanimistKachin of Burma, are described as "patrilineal" with authority belonging to a chief or council of elders (1960:51, 63). The hill peoples, sometimes also called hilltribes,1 are well-known in the anthropological literature for their marriage systems, often called "asymmetric alliance" (e.g., Needham 1959b).2 In such systems, a man may not receive a wife from the descent unit to which his own descent unit gives a wife, and vice versa. Simply put, the definitional asymmetry is that "wife-givers cannot be wife-takers" (Fox 1967:208). Wife-givers and wife-takers are often unequal in status, with the wife-givers usually superior, but it is important to remember that such status asymmetry is not definitional to asymmetric alliance. Anthropologists sometimes call wife-givers and wife-takers in systems of this type mayu and dama, respectively, borrowing indigenous terms from Kachin via Leach's (1954) important monograph. In a familiar process within anthropology, mayu and dama have joined totem and taboo as ethnographic-turned-analytical categories. Frequently these systems are labelled "matrilateral cross-cousin marriage" (e.g., Fox 1967:209), though I will argue against this usage. For anthropologists, another well-known feature of mainland Southeast Asia's hill societies is their political systems, the subject of Leach's classic study of Kachin social structure. In Political Systems of Highland Burma, he argues that Kachin have two ideal types of political order: one "ruled by chiefs who are members of an hereditary aristocracy," now known by Kachin and anthropologists alike as gumsa, and the other which repudiates "all notions of hereditary class difference," known as gumlao (Leach 1954:198). The contrasting "theories of government," then, are gumsa hierarchy, which draws upon the model of valley Shan feudal autocracy, and gumlao democracy or egalitarianism, which rejects both Shan and gumsa
This article explores the way patrilineal descent and affinity intersect and interlock with the political system among Tibeto-Burman-speaking Akha highlanders of mainland Southeast Asia. In contrast to Leach's famous work on the Kachin of Burma, the Akha case suggests that asymmetric alliance is not only compatible with egalitarian political organization but can also be constitutive of it. Uncovering the cultural nexus between descent and affinity and the structural linkage between asymmetric alliance and political egalitarianism requires a kinship analysis that is also an analysis of local constructions of gender, [kinship, asymmetric alliance, gender, political systems, comparison, Southeast Asia, Akha] American Ethnologist 25(4):659-674. Copyright © 1998, American Anthropological Association.
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inequality (Leach 1954:197, 9). Leach (1954:210) claims there is "oscillation" between these polar political systems because both gumsa and gumlao are unstable.3 In adopting the manners of Shan princes, gumsa chiefs alienate their subordinates by treating them as mere slaves or tenants rather than as followers linked by kin ties (Leach 1954:203, 288). According to Leach (1954:203), gumlao egalitarianism shifts toward gumsa hierarchy because inequality is a potential of the marriage system. Highlanders of mainland Southeast Asia also figure prominently in anthropological debates about the nature of ethnic identity, debates sparked by Leach's (1954:286) report that Kachin can become Shan and vice versa. His critique of static and discrete functionalist models about "what constitutes a culture and a tribe" spawned an antiessentialist literature on shifting and contextual ethnicity (Leach 1954:281 ).4 Leach, however, does not himself refer to ethnicity, identity, or ethnic identity, and, ironically, explicitly denies that the differences between Kachin and Shan are ethnic in nature. Instead, he argues, Kachins speak of people "becoming gumlao" or "becoming Shan". . . . This implies that the Kachins themselves think of the difference between Shan and gumsa Kachin as being a difference of ideal, and not, as the ethnologists would have us believe, a difference of ethnic, cultural or racial type. [Leach 1954:286)
Importantly, the "ethnic" rejected by Leach is not the constructionist ethnicity of his theoretical heirs but the essentialist ethnicity of his predecessors. In 1960 Leach reported that for northern Thailand, "the ethnographic descriptions are too defective to permit confident generalisation," but suggested that "the same two contrasted types of political ideology appear to coexist" as in Burma—now officially Myanmar (1960:63). Since then, anthropologists have done extensive field research among Thailand's hill people.5 Asymmetric alliance among Thailand's hilltribes was first documented for Akha whose current self-designation is "Rolled Hat Akha" (Ujov AjkaJ (Kammerer 1984, 1986; see 1989 on changing subgroup self-identification).6 Tooker (1991) found a similar system among other Akha, the Loimi "headdress sub-group," who began entering Thailand from Burma in the late 1970s. My purpose is threefold. First, I provide an ethnographic account of patrilineal kinship, marriage, and political order among Akha highlanders of northern Thailand. In particular, I focus on descent and affinity and the way they intersect and interlock with the political system. Second, I consider the Akha case as a contribution to anthropological understanding of kinship, politics, and ethnic identity among hilltribe societies of Southeast Asia. I should note that, having analyzed Akha identity at length elsewhere (Kammerer 1988b, 1990), I treat the issue here only as it relates to kinship and political order. Finally, I explain how this exercise in Southeast Asian ethnographic analysis might be relevant to anthropologists who are not also Southeast Asianists. A short introduction to Akha precedes three sections on their descent and asymmetric alliance systems. My central ethnographic argument is that for Akha descent and asymmetric alliance are inextricably intertwined. Two premises should be made explicit at the outset. First, the division in kinship studies between descent theorists (who focus on relations to ancestors) and alliance theorists (who concentrate on marriage relations) is an artificial one and must give way to consideration of kinship systems in their complexity. For Akha, as I shall explain, descent and alliance are profoundly interdependent. Second, kinship analysis must also be gender analysis, as Yanagisako and Collier (1987) have argued. For Akha neither descent nor alliance can be understood apart from the social and cosmological roles of men and women (Kammerer 1984, 1986, in press). Overall, the Akha case illustrates that asymmetric alliance and status superiority of wife-givers can contribute to egalitarian village organization (Kammerer 1986; Tooker 1991). Thus my conclusion supports Kipp's (1983) earlier argument, based on Karo Batak data, that, contrary to Leach (1954), asymmetric marriage alliance and egalitarian political organization are not incompatible. My ethnographic discussion of the Akha example also has implications for the
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enterprise of anthropology, specifically concerning the nature and use of analytical categories and of comparison. I turn to these issues in the article's conclusion.
introducing Akha Like Kachin, Akha are speakers of a Tibeto-Burman language. And like Kachin and other hilltribes of continental Southeast Asia, they cultivate rice, maize, and other crops predominantly by slash-and-burn agriculture. With a population of over 400,000, Akha live in villages interspersed with those of other ethnic groups in a swath of territory extending from Yunnan Province in southwest China, through the Shan State of eastern Burma, northern Laos, the western tip of northern Vietnam, and into northern Thailand. In the People's Republic of China (PRO there are some 150,000 Akha, who number among the Hani national minority (Hansson 1991:1); in Burma there are perhaps 180,000 (Lewis and Lewis 1984:204); in Laos the government counts 59,000 (Lao PDR 1985); in Vietnam Akha constitute some, if not all, of the 9,000 Hani (Hansson 1991:2); and in Thailand official censuses between 1989 and 1992 found 32,041 Akha (Tribal Research Institute 1992). From the writings of foreign colonial officers, missionaries, explorers, and travelers available prior to my fieldwork, it is clear that Akha traditionally have a rich ritual life including ancestor offerings, calendrical rites, and curing ceremonies.7 Since the early decades of this century, many Akha, especially in Burma, have abandoned their indigenous religion in favor of either Protestantism or Catholicism, but these Akha are not considered here because the focus is on the way in which traditionalist religious beliefs and practices intertwine with kinship, politics, and ethnic identity. Today Akha in the PRC, Burma, the Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR), Vietnam, and Thailand are incorporated into the national political system. For instance, Akha villages in Thailand, like ethnic Thai villages, have elected headmen who receive from the government a small salary to attend monthly meetings at the district center. Prior to the emergence of modern nation-states in the region, however, Akha, like their Kachin neighbors, were incorporated to varying degrees into the feudal principalities of the lowland Tai-speaking Shan. An Akha man might be "given a title" and asked by a Shan lord to serve as head of his own village or a circle of villages. Such former functionaries of the lowland feudal autocracy—and contemporary elected village headmen—are the only Akha permitted to receive a prestigious form of funeral in which the deceased is offered a red-caparisoned horse like those in the stately processions of Shan princely pomp. Yet, despitethese indications of hierarchy, the indigenous Akha political system is fundamentally egalitarian, similar to gumlao Kachin. Akha do not have hereditary social classes, ranked lineages, or autocratic leadership.
descent among Akha: in the name of the father Like Kachin, Akha are patrilineal.8 They share with many Tibeto-Burman speakers what Lo Ch'ang-p'ei (1945) has dubbed the "genealogical patronymic linkage system," in which the final syllable(s) of the father's name becomes the first syllable(s) of his son's name. The naming pattern is AB-BC-CD, ABC-BCD-CDE, or a combination thereof for a man, his son, and his son's son.9 Akha genealogies recorded in 1935 in southwest China descend in this pattern (Lo Ch'ang-p'ei 1945:358-359), just as do those I collected in northern Thailand more than forty years later. What was previously unreported, however, is that for Akha—and perhaps also for other Tibeto-Burman speakers—both sons and daughters are named according to this system. This ethnographic oversight is no doubt due to the fact that women's names are not preserved in patrilineal genealogies. Through patronymic linkage, which is established at the naming
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ceremony held shortly after birth, Akha daughters are incorporated into their father's patriline in the same way as Akha sons. This genealogical system is ethnically inclusive or universal in that it proclaims all Akha to be descendants of M/najng'ah" (Main Sky-Middle Sky). At the "top" of every genealogy, immediately below this apical ancestor, are nine generations, or "joints" (tsuij, as Akha call them, of spirits; then comes the first man, Smvmrov, who is usually followed by some fifty generations of his male descendants.10 Akha have a segmentary lineage system in which patrilineages are unranked. Brothers stand at the formative junctures of segmentation, but their age or generational level does not translate into lineage ranking. Neither do patrilineages belong to ranked classes. These are absent among Akha as well as other hilltribes such as Thailand's Lisu and Lahu Sheh Leh (Durrenberger 1983; Walker 1993), but present among others such as Kachin and Northern and Central Chin who have chiefly, aristocratic, commoner, and slave classes (Leach 1954; Lehman 1963, 1989, 1992). The Akha segmentary system consists of three levels of descent categories: named maximal patrilineages (av]euv, avca, a^jeu^ca, a^gu), unnamed medial or sublineages (pav), and unnamed minimal lineages (pyaj. Patrilineages and sublineages are not localized, but minimal lineages are. The exogamous unit is the unnamed sublineage rather than the named lineage. Only the minimal lineage is technically both a descent category and a descent group, following Keesing's (1975:10) definitions in which members of a descent category are grouped conceptually, while members of a descent group actually rub elbows and "recurrently interact in an interconnected set of roles." Since maximal lineages typically bear the name of the ancestor at a formative node, they might be considered to be "surname groups" like those of Chinese or Hmong (Cooper et al. 1991:18-19), a hilltribe heavily influenced historically by Chinese (Tapp 1989). But Akha lineages are technically categories rather than groups. Whereas membership in Chinese and Hmong patrilineal surname groups is inherited lineally from forebears to whom genealogical links need not be known, membership in Akha patrilineal descent categories is inherited lineally from forebears to whom genealogical links must be known. To label Akha maximal descent constructs patrilineal surnames or surname groups rather than patrilineages obscures the backbone of the Akha conceptualization, that is, its lengthy and legitimizing lineality. Known ancestors are not just those who lent their names to lineages: among Akha all ancestors in the direct patriline back to Main Sky-Middle Sky are known by name. Hill peoples' patrilineal categories or surname groups are often referred to by analysts as dans. Elsewhere I have argued that from the Akha point of view their own ethnic group is what anthropologists call a clan, since, as noted, all Akha consider themselves the common descendants of the same apical ancestor (Kammerer 1988b:267). Were I to rewrite that earlier article today I would not use the word clan because Akha know the genealogical links to their apical ancestor, whereas for many anthropologists, for example, Keesing (1975:148), a clan is a descent category in which those links, by definition, are unknown. 11 To avoid conflating Akha patrilineal categories with either clans or surname groups (called dans in the literature), I now prefer to label them lineages—to emphasize both their lineality and their known constituent links. The universalistic genealogy that encompasses all Akha, then, constitutes what can be called an ethnolineage, and the descent categories within it are patrilineages of varying scope. Membership in minimal lineages, which I prefer to call patrilineal families, is based on making offerings together at a single ancestor altar. The largest such unit that I have encountered consisted of four generations of direct patrilineal kin living in two different compounds and sharing one altar to their common ancestors. A married son establishes an independent patrilineal family (minimal lineage) when, with his father's help, he installs his own ancestor altar in a house of his own outside his father's compound. From an analytical perspective, an Akha patrilineal family is a localized descent group; it is defined by Akha themselves as a ritual rather than residential unit.
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Among Akha, postmarital residence is patrivirilocal, that is, a daughter leaves her natal household at marriage to join her husband at his father's house. Yet a woman's link to her natal patrikin—a link established and evidenced by her patronymic genealogical name—is never completely severed, even when she is incorporated into her husband's patrilineal kinship categories through marriage. An interesting aspect of Akha offerings to patrilineal ancestors is that the ancestors who are fed include male forebears in the direct patriline as well as the women married to those men. Thus, patrilineal ancestors are ascending husband and wife pairs, not just the men whose names are memorialized in genealogies.
Akha affinity: "hands not clasped" and "hands clasped" Prior to my fieldwork little was known about the regulation of marriage among Akha other than that a young man can choose his bride, patrilineal kin are barred from intermarriage, and divorce is both easy and frequent (Lewis 1969-70). During my fieldwork, I learned that "it is not permissible to marry by exchanging a wife for a sister" (mivpavdmvpavmajaj
