I can't tell you why I have been intrigued by Akha usages of space since I first began to work among the Akha people, but they have not only provided me with fertile ground for reconsidering analytic and theoretical concepts within anthropology, they have also provided me with a means to understand the position of the Akha in the interethnic context of the Southeast Asian borderlands, an area recently termed ‘Zomia’ (Scott 2009 after Van Schendel). I also must confess to an aesthetic pleasure arising from being in sheer awe of the beauty and complexity of these practices.

This book has been a long time in the works. Many will be surprised, even disappointed, that although I have continued fieldwork among the Akha (as recently as 2010), I have decided to restrict the material in this book mainly to that collected during my first intensive period of fieldwork 1982-1985. I did this for several reasons: 1) I saw the beginnings of serious structural discontinuities in the society I studied around the time I was leaving the field in 1985. Those continued and became exacerbated each time I returned to the community of research; 2) I thought that there were significant theoretical, conceptual, and comparative questions about this earlier time period that were worth pursuing and that could be considered in light of more recent discussions within anthropology; 3) Including changes after 1985 would have made the book an unreasonable length; and 4) I have elsewhere (Tooker 2004) addressed the structural changes that I saw post-1985 and their effects on collective identity. The recent and active discussions about the region of ‘Zomia’1, which in Scott's work (2009) are based on communities prior to full nation-state integration, makes this work relevant at this time. I do apologize for places where I use the present tense. However, the reader should keep in mind that the ‘ethnographic present’ is 1982-1985.

While three chapters of this book are drawn from ethnographic material in my original Ph.D. dissertation (Tooker 1988), they have been rethought and reframed in relation to both theories and concepts in anthropology that have developed since that time. Perhaps the most important influence has been the historicizing of ‘culture’, reflected mainly, but not only, in Chapter 2.