People First: The Wa World of Spirits and Other Enemies

ABSTRACT

The Wa spirit world implies a certain rootedness. Knowledge of the location and propensities of spirits is necessary to engage their capricious menace through divination diagnostics and sacrificial remedies. Even as outsiders have attempted to introduce modern medicine, spirit neighbours and enemies continue to figure prominently in Wa health, disease and death. I outline how these practices for managing the menaces of the spirit world survived the demise of the political autonomy of the Wa in the 1950s and 1960s, when the ancient Wa lands were divided and annexed by the nation-states of China and Burma. Finally, I discuss the disastrous consequences of recent forced displacements of large numbers of people, which caused many unnecessary deaths by disrupted the victim’s established ways of dealing with disease as anchored in the local landscape.

KEYWORDS:

• Wa
• Burma
• China
• disease
• death
• sacrifice
• medicine
• autonomy
• forced resettlement

Acknowledgements

For valuable comments, I thank Giovanni Da Col as editor, and the other contributors, as well as Hjorleifur Jonsson, the late Nicholas Tapp, and Monique Skidmore, organiser of the panel at the July 2006 Burma Studies Conference where one early version of this paper was presented. I salute all of my interlocutors in Wa country, and I thank the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; China Times Cultural Foundation; Pacific Cultural Foundation; Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and Cornell University’s Southeast Asia Program.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Fiskesjö (2000, 2009a, 2013a, 2013b).

2. See Turner (1986); for an attempt to model the dynamic processes of center–periphery interaction in the region, including for the Wa, see Friedman 1998(1979).

3. On swiddening (mountain forest farming deploying fire for clearing fields), see Sprenger (2006). On Wa swiddening and agricultural intensification, Yin (2001, 2009).

4. See Fiskesjö (2000, 2002, 2009b, 2015), and Ling (1953).

5. Macquoid (1896, p. 24), Harvey (1933, p. 91), Friedman (1998, pp. 269 ff.), Fiskesjö (2010a).

6. On the ubiquitous Wa rice beer, which remains the prime vehicle for these everyday rituals, see Fiskesjö (2010b).

7. In 1995–1998, 2006 and 2013 (see Fiskesjö 2013b). On the Wa language, see Watkins (2013) and Li (1996). I use a slightly modified orthography to reflect the dialect of the area of study.

8. For a broader perspective on the dismantling of Mao-era socialist medicine, see Duckett (2011).

9. The community-wide rituals of old have not been revived: Their political significance precludes this. They are only partly revived today as staged events; festivals linked to commercial tourism, etc. (cf. Fiskesjö 2015).

10. Modern (Western scientific) medicine is known among the Wa as ‘Chinese’ medicine (a dah Houx): it is brought mainly by Chinese agents. Chinese herbal medicines, which demand daily or frequent preparation and administration, does not have the currency it enjoys in majority-Chinese areas.

11. In the Ximeng County area, this is traditionally done with an unmarked burial in the garden of one’s own house. This tradition may have developed historically in the Wa heartland as a means of countering head-snatchers who might steal the head of the deceased, but it also reflects the sense that dying at home offers comfort and solace.

12. I have attended quite a few funerals – by far the most painful part of my fieldwork as an anthropologist. I had often come to know those who died, old and young, and felt sad for them, while also trying to treat each funeral as an ethnographic opportunity. I often felt helpless in the face of many diseases (including parasites, and other such grave afflictions. I came only with military training in emergency medicine, in my native Sweden. I was only able to help with flesh wounds and some illnesses, aided by Werner, Thuman, and Maxwell (1992) (indispensable, for any fieldworker!). See below; and Fiskesjö (2013b).

13. Wa funerals are tremendous multi-day outpourings of affection amongst the living, and commemoration of the deceased – including in the form of some of the most profoundly beautiful songs in the repertoire of Wa music, only performed at certain hours in the dead of night during the wake for the recent dead (including the song of the bumble-bee which, like humans, must navigate its mountainscape).

14. For more on the hospitality extended towards fellow villagers, dead ancestors, as well as strangers; and on the critical consequences of the failure of hospitality, see Fiskesjö (2010b) (also the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute special issue 18.s1 [2012], ‘The return to hospitality: strangers, guests, and ambiguous encounters’, edited by Candea and da Col).

15. The classic discussion of spirits and ‘animism’ in our region is Telford (1937); also see Hackett (1969), a rather anti-racist missionary in Burma with sympathy for local cultures, not least in realizing that what he sees as local ‘animism’ is not so different from his own Bible (in which he finds Jacob in Genesis 28:10–22 dreaming of a stone where a spirit dwells; and, in Joshua 24:27, a stone as a witness to events that took place in front of it).

16. As for ‘spirits’, I prefer this over ‘demons’, which would suggest they actively harbor anti-human ill intent; yet in the Wa conception, while all spirits are potentially harmful for humans, other than the ge meang many are actually indifferent to humans, spirits exist in parallel with us and are only harmful when encountered, even if accidentally. Note how similar this is to modern medicine’s understanding of bacteria!

17. See, though, the compilation of herbal medicines mostly from the Wa peripheries (the present-day counties of Lancang and Cangyuan), by Guo, Duan, and Guo (1990–1992). But this work also does not address the fateful absence of native herbal treatments in the central Wa country.

18. Scott and Hardiman (1900–1901), Vol. I, part 2, 29.

19. On ‘parasitic’ spirits, compare da Col (2012); on prohibitions generally, Valeri (1999).

20. On Wa chicken bone divination and other forms (using pig intestines, cattle livers, etc.), see f.ex. Li (1996), Ling (1953), and below.

21. Cf. below, and Turner (1988), on origin myths and latter-day ‘anti-myths’.

22. Descola (1996, p. 87), cf. Tsintjilonis (2004); also Descola (2013). For a powerful critique of Descola’s and other post-structuralist views on animism, totemism, perspectivism and so on, see Turner (2009); more recently, Willerslev (2015).

23. Turner (2009) highlights the lingering, and misguided insistence on a nature-culture divide as universal or ubiquituous, in some post-structuralist writings.

24. Fiskesjö (2010a); also see Friedman (1998), on social hierarchy as context of the production of beneficial deities supposedly mediated by the socially superior (such as kings).

25. See f.ex. Telford (1937), Izikowitz [1941] 1985, Walker (2003), Langford (2009).

26. I was allowed to attend while confined in the house, but never to join a search team.

27. Such oracles do not study or apprentice, but simply and suddenly realize they are endowed, and know how to use their powers. Communist Chinese analysis has portrayed such oracle figures as cheating the common people for-profit. This tendentious and self-serving judgment misses the point – and in my experience the fees are modest indeed: a small bottle of liquor, etc.

28. One can also take the preventive step of ti’eib nkeang, ‘setting up a threshold’ on behalf of, for example, vulnerable children in one’s family. This is a hlax doh sacrifice that can even be done on a monthly basis – if chicken are available.

29. Ma (2013).

30. Anti-myths (Turner 1988), in Wa country and elsewhere in the world, address discrepancies and injustices as regards the possession of writing systems, modern weaponry, the loss of ancestral lands, etc. brought about by powerful alien people (and not by deities, animals, etc., as in mythic accounts which set the stage for human existence as such).

31. Fiskesjö (2015).

32. I have tried to write about this elsewhere: Fiskesjö (2011, 2015).

33. Lintner (1990, 2014), also Miller (2001).

34. Including, recently, the compilation by Chinese officials of Chinese-style gazetteers for Wa State districts, printed in Chinese, in China, and where only the title page has text in Wa (Miandian Wa Bang Mengmao Xian zhi = Phuk lai Been Meung Mau, edited by Mengmao Xianzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui. [China: s.n., 2002]). On these issues see Fiskesjö (2009a); on the Wa State see too Lintner (1990, 1992, 1994, 2014), Kramer (2007), Renard (2013).

35. But see Renard 2013: the late Renard served 2006–2007 as manager of a United Nations drug substitution project in the Wa area, under the UNODC (the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime), and made some observations on the relocations.

36. S.H.A.N. (2003, 2006a, 2006b); Lahu National Development Organization (2002) (Unsettling Moves, the most extensive report); Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (2004), Global IDP Database (2005: 36–38); also Renard (2013). Also see Jagan (2005).

37. The Lahu National Development Organization, which published Unsettling Moves, cited 126,000 people just for 1999–2001; the figure given by the Wa authorities was only 50,000; others have cited 250,000 (cf. Global IDP Database 2005, pp. 36–38).

38. In this context, blanket condemnations and indictments issued by the US (U.S. Dept. of State 2006; Lintner 2010; Kramer et al. 2014) identifying Wa State leaders as criminal drug dealers, delivered at about the time when those same authorities were declaring their own war on opium and holding out for some amount of recognition, seem indifferent to the de facto and official position of the Wa State leaders as ethno-nationalistic leaders and administrators of the area and people under their control.

39. Kramer et al. (2014).

40. After the UWSA prevailed over forces of the competing drug lord Khun Sa. On the then-Rangoon governments’ involvement, co-planning the evacuations as part of a declared plan to depopulate opium areas, see BBC (2000).

41. Chouvy (2004), Kramer (2005), also Jelsma and Kramer (2005) (especially p. 3; 13–20); on the UN efforts to help, see Renard (2013).

42. Woods (2011), Kramer and Woods (2012), also Lambrecht (2004).

43. See the Global IDP Database (2005, report of 27 June 2005, pp. 36–38), on how ‘displacement continues unabated in one of the world’s worst IDP situations.’

44. Evrard and Goudineau (2004), Baird and Shoemaker (2007), High (2008), on Laos; Cholthira (2000) on Thailand (where strategic forced relocations also has a long history, cf. Grabowski 1999); British and American wartime forced resettlement of populations in Malaysia and Vietnam come to mind; and in today’s Vietnam ‘development-induced’ relocations continue (Doutriaux, Geisler, and Shively 2008).

45. The basic policy continues, even if with the selective downgrading of activist state interference since the 1980s some villages have actually moved back by their own initiative, or keep dual residences at different elevations and with different style of construction:. Chinese concrete or mud-brick, vs. indigenous wood and bamboo, often raised on poles. There are several reasons for this, including health-related: The preference for hillside climate as opposed to the valley floors is based on traditional concerns about the hot weather and stagnant waters of valley floors, which naturally generate many more mosquitos and therefore diseases like malaria, which are much feared (and known in Wa as saix houig’), and for which people are not prepared in the same way (either biologically, epidemiologically or in terms of cultural practice) as traditional valley-dwellers. Raised-pole houses are not earthquake-prone, and provide better circulation.

46. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (2004).

47. S.H.A.N. 2003 (‘Sickness and death hit Wa – Again’).

48. Lahu National Development Organisation (2002). Opium, in small doses, is recognized as effective drug against diarrhea; unfortunately there is no more information here on what the other ‘traditional medicines’ might have been, apart from ‘magic’ sacrifices apparently carried out in tragically blind desperation.

49. Agamben (2000).

50. Scott (1998).

51. Michelet [1846] 1973.

52. In Russia, the creation of the state and the empire has been aptly, if paradoxically, characterized as ‘self-colonization’ (see Etkind 2011) – the transformation of autonomous people, into subjects, and thus into the means of the State’s end.