Upland-lowland relations

Any discussion of a ‘village polity’ needs to be linked to what that polity has historically been posed against and contrastively defined by. For the Akha, this is the Tai lowland muang (town/kingdom)[Akha: mǝ], a recognition by the Akha that they are and have been in a continuing interaction with more powerful lowland groups. The Akha polity itself (and one could say Akha identity as well) has come into existence, and is reproduced, through this dialectical relationship with the lowlands (see Chapter 2; see also Alting 1983). This chapter discusses that relationship but also includes spatial tactics (such as precedence and encompassment in power relations, and both aggregation and dispersion of power) that are applied within Akha society as well.

The historical relationship between upland and lowland societies in Southeast Asia can be generally characterized as one in which politically dominant (more) centralized lowland governments have attempted some control of, or extraction from, hill peripheries, and upland decentralized governments have attempted to resist that control. As we have seen in Chapter 2, historically, the Akha have had complex relations with various Tai groups of the lowlands (including the Thai of Thailand, the Shan of Burma, the Tai Lue of China, etc.) as well as with other upland groups (Lisu, Lahu, Bulong, etc.). They may have even been displaced from some lowland areas to the hills by Tai groups, as they claim to be the case in Yunnan. Of course, now in China they are more directly influenced by the Han Chinese who have usurped the domination of the Tai in areas of Southwest China.

Occurring as they have in pre-colonial and non-colonial (e.g. Thailand) contexts, these systems of political domination and resistance cannot be understood in the same terms in which analysts have portrayed political domination through colonial encounters, the expansion of (western) capitalist systems and/or the expansion of the nation-state.