Fire and potency: the essences of Akha space and identity

In other words, it has become increasingly important to do justice to the fact that cultures, identities, and spaces are no longer and never have been identical with geographical locales. As a result, it is necessary to formulate concepts of spaces and places in terms of social practices and intergroup relations as the spatial are “social relations stretched out” (Massey 1996: 2). One way to conceptualise spaces is to regard them as closely linked to socio-cultural practices, as both the outcome of action as well as the medium or structure of action. Space is lived before it is perceived, and constituted before it can be “read” (Lefebvre [1974] 1996: 143). Spatiality is an immediate part of every human culture; it is the symbolic and symbolising medium of action and a system of social order, communicative action, classification, values and appropriation of spaces. 

Akha intergroup and power relations

In her book “Space and the Production of Cultural difference among the Akha prior to Globalization”, Deborah Tooker analyses “the identity-producing dimensions of Akha spatial practices” (p. 24). On the basis of her broad anthropological field material, she highlights that Akha spatial practices are the result of centuries of interactions between upland and lowland groups in Southeast Asia, between the ‘center’ and the ‘periphery’. As such, spatial practices always have to be studied in this intergroup context and cannot be looked upon in isolation – no matter if we study spatial practices of ethnic minority groups in Southeast Asia or if we analyze space making processes of other groups such as migrants, city dwellers, or commuters, just to give a few examples, elsewhere in the world.
It is the author’s aim to understand relationships between space, power, and identity formation on the basis of her anthropological material drawn from the Akha in Chiang Rai Province in Northern Thailand. The data presented in the book relates to Deborah Tooker’s field research in the years 1982-1985 and as such has a historical dimension. The 1980s were a time when the migratory Akha originating from China still lived under conditions of semi-autonomy and were still able to found their own villages, households, and fields in the mountainous areas of Southeast Asia. As a counterbalance to their marginality in the ‘periphery’ of the Thai nation state, as Tooker expands, the Akha created a protective ‘internal space’ that constituted the center and ‘potency’ (or ‘life force’) of Akha society and guarded them from a potentially dangerous, non-Akha outside sphere. Questioning James Scott’s (1998) clear distinction between center and periphery, the book draws our attention to existing hierarchies within Akha society and the cultural redefinition of Akha society as the ‘center’, thus reversing lowland hierarchies and creating a degree of autonomy. Through spatial practices and local belief systems, the lowlands are redefined as the perilous, devalued periphery.
Other ethnic mountain groups in Thailand, such as the Karen and Hmong people, also historically created their own spaces protecting them from menacing external spheres and constituting ‘cultural centers’ apart from majority society and an internal basis for identity making processes (Tomforde 2006). These spatially boundless models of ‘mountain spaces’, be they in the form of ‘Hmong mountains’, ‘Karen land’ or ‘Akha domain’, cross regional boundaries both within and outside Thailand, interconnecting communities and creating an alternative sphere for the marginalized. By means of spatially boundless socio-cultural practices and interrelations, minority mountain groups thus constitute a spatiality they can call their own. This socially produced, protective spatial context provides the basis for cultural identity and bestows people with self-confidence and ‘power’ apart from nation state politics and uneven power relations – in most cases up until today. This space runs parallel to the relationship of subservience and subordination in Thai society and gives ethnic mountain peoples the possibility of distinguishing themselves as a minority with their ‘own place in the world’.
By looking at Akha spatial practices, Deborah Tooker shows how processes of marginalization and stigmatization are countered. Instead of solely internalizing the lowland-upland/superior-inferior paradigm, the Akha believe in an ‘internally derived potency’ (p. 54) flowing from inside-out, constituting the center of Akha life. Due to her vigorous study and analysis of Akha culture and spatial practices, similarities with spatial lowland practices and codes of complexly organized Hindu-Buddhist Southeast Asian polities become apparent which have been overlooked so far. Consequently, we need to start to think of mandala as “a socially enacted set of codes that communicate and index hierarchical status between individuals and groups, both dominant and non-dominant.” (p. 215). However, Akha’s concepts of space should not be reduced to state resistance. Tooker’s thorough ethnography and study of Akha ritual, cosmology and meaning systems underlines that spatial practices also helped to maintain order within the autonomous Akha polity and center balancing power between individuals, households, and the village as an entity. When studying Akha notions of health and illness or village restoration ceremonies, it becomes apparent that Akha practices are spatially coded and as such connected to notions of potency or ‘life force’. These spatial practices help to maintain and reinforce a positive valuation of Akha identity and even a superior status. 

New challenges

By reviewing her field research material from the early 1980s, Tooker draws our attention to the fact that manifold spatial practices helped to create a distinctive Akha identity developed in the historical context of uneven power relations in Thailand. In this process of identity formation and validation, the Akha have reconstituted themselves as being in the ‘center’ – just like many other ethnic groups in Southeast Asia maintain this clear distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ and according to their cosmologies see themselves as being located in the center.
Deborah Tooker’s publication is not only a great ethnography and much appreciated historic account of Akha life in Thailand before globalization. It is also and foremost a very valuable contribution to the study of space, laying a foundation for further studies on spatial practices, creation of identity and place as well as historical and political positioning in mainland Southeast Asia. Tooker asks us to rethink our “idyllic characterizations of any ‘natural’ nonmodern isomorphism in discussions of space” (p. 242). Her book succeeds in showing us how the Akha have maintained a “trans-regional” identity despite centuries of spatial dispersion and a ‘minority status’ in areas where other groups have been dominant.
Effects of globalization and increased technologies of control by the Thai nation state (see McCaskill/Leepreecha/Shaoying 2007) especially in the past decade have resulted in “serious structural discontinuities”(p. 13) not only among the Akha but also among other ethnic mountain groups in Thailand. One can only hope that despite these disruptive forces and influences, these groups will be able to maintain a socio-culturally constituted “in-between space” of dislocation, minority and existential identification and to survive socio-culturally within a geopolitical space they do not determine and over which they have only limited means of power. Spatiality relates to a socio-cultural positioning within a space, which can be powered or governed by others. Deborah Tooker’s book acknowledges the fact that power can also be constituted through an alternative redefinition of the spatial and that can hopefully be adapted to ever-changing, new circumstances.  

Maren Tomforde, Department of Anthropology at the University of Hamburg; Visiting Fellow at Macquarie University, Australia (maren.tomforde@mq.edu.au) 

Citation: Tomforde, M. 2016. Review of: Tooker, D.E. 2012. Space and the production of cultural difference among the Akha prior to globalization, posted on New Books Asia on 23 Feb 2016; newbooks.asia/review/fire-and-potency-essences-akha-space-and-identity

Cited Literature
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Massey. D (1996): A global Sense of Place. In: Barnes, T./Gregory, D. (eds), Reading Human Geography: The Poetics and Politics of Inquiry. Arnold, London. 
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