RETURNING to the Mutraw hills, similar experiments with Indigenous modes of conservation that pushed back against ceasefire territorialization were afoot. These experiments, however, took on a markedly different texture and temper to those enacted in other parts of southeast Myanmar. In these highlands, in the last stronghold of the Karen Revolution, rather than simply opposing the KNU with acts of “civil disorder,” people’s efforts to resist their dispossession occasionally became aligned with the KNU seventy-year struggle for greater autonomy. The KNU’s revolutionary project was constantly haunted by spectral sovereignty, opening up for alternative modes of politics, or alter-politics.

Feeling the predatory Myanmar state gradually encroach upon their lives through the expansion of economic and religious spheres, people’s first reaction was to appeal to the authority and sovereignty of the KNU for protection. The KNU in these parts had, as I have illustrated, long warned residents of the Mutraw hills of the dangers of a creeping ta du ta yah hku (cool/peaceful conflict) following the ceasefire and had sworn to assist them. Yet despite many concerted attempts by villagers to entreat them, the KNU once more regularly ran up against the limits of their sovereignty, which became threadbare toward the top of the Bu Thoe ridge. The KNU continued to have little palpable effect on local day-to-day politics. Not easily disheartened, the villagers again turned to spectral sovereigns to assist them, experimenting with Indigenous modes of conservation. The specters then intervened, finally protecting these forested highlands from harm—at least for now. In this manner, spectral sovereignty intermittently became interwoven into KNU’s own patchy sovereignty, augmenting their hold over these highlands. In creating small pockets of relative autonomy, such Indigenous modes of conservation also became temporarily aligned with KNU’s ongoing struggle for self-determination. The Mutraw hills were becoming a space for staging encounters, where different experiments with conservation and autonomy were coming into contact and being negotiated.

PAGODA POLITICS

During the period I stayed in Ta K’Thwee Duh, from January to September 2017, there were only two Buddhist households in the village. To be specific, these households were spoken of not as Buddhist but as Bah Hpaw (literally, flower worshippers, due to the prominent use of flowers in their offering to the specters and the Buddha). Bah Hpaw is a syncretic mix of Buddhism and Thoo Hkoh/Moh La Pa Lah (often glossed as animism/ancestral worship). One of these households belonged to Hpee Luh, the de facto representative for the Karen Women’s Organisation (KWO), and her husband, Hpu Hka Hsoo, and the other belonged to their eldest daughter. Hpu Hka Hsoo, the elder with a well-waxed handlebar mustache and a paddy field, had first come into contact with monks during his migrations to and peregrinations around Thailand. Like many other people in these highlands, he adapted several Thoo Hkoh practices to better accord with the Buddha’s teachings. One such adaption entailed abstaining from agricultural work, eating meat and drinking alcohol, and making offerings of animals to lu ta (feed) the spectral owners and ancestors during certain phases of the moon.¹ Such syncretic practices led the two Bah Hpaw households in the village to adopt several highly inventive variations on day-to-day practices oriented toward traversing possessed landscapes: specifically, the constant negotiation with spectral sovereigns, which regularly involved the slaying and eating of animals and the imbuing of copious amounts of alcohol.

When ritually important days such as the wrist-tying ceremony coincided with a full moon, for example, Hpu Hka Hsoo and the other members of his household forwent the usual offerings. Hpu Hka Hsoo invoked the specters to join them in eating a sacrificial meal of store-bought snacks, not the usual pork or chicken, and replaced libations of rice wine with cans of Sprite. This allowed them to avoid killing and consuming alcohol while still respecting their ancestors. Such heady mixes of practices led some of his fellow villagers to level accusations at him and his family that they had “given way to” ta lay p’saw (temptations) from Buddhist monks and been corrupted by them. Some villagers even claimed he had become “crazy with religion.”

Despite the persistent suspicions and rumors that swirled around this family’s practices, many of the villagers sympathized with Hpee Luh’s complaints that she had converted to Buddhism for her husband but had never actually met a monk. One of the villagers, who in his younger days had also migrated to Thailand and found work building temples and monasteries, arranged for a monk he knew to visit the village. This monk was Pwakanyaw, hailing from Khoe Kay, a day’s hike south of the village along the Myanmar side of the Salween River. He arrived some weeks later and led the two Bah Hpaw households through several rituals. Despite this visit, Hpee Luh still felt frustrated. She continued to complain that there was nowhere nearby where they could worship. Eventually, she decided to take matters into her own hands and contacted this monk again, requesting his assistance to build a small pagoda in the village. As she asked me rhetorically, “the Christians have their schools and their churches, so why can’t we have a small place to worship too?” Before long, however, these plans ran into considerable resistance from her fellow villagers.

Hpee Luh herself later confessed that she had not conferred with anyone outside her household about raising a Buddhist monument in the village beforehand—not even with her husband, who was working in Thailand at the time. So, when the Pwakanyaw monk, along with two Thai monk companions, arrived unannounced in the village one cold January afternoon in 2017, it caused quite a stir. The tension around these monks only heightened when the other villagers learned that they, together with Hpee Luh, planned to build a pagoda right beside the primary school at the top of the village. This all came to a head when, following a heated meeting hastily organized at the headman’s house, they agreed that they would forbid this religious structure from being erected so close to the village. Subsequently, I learned that some of the villagers at this meeting had argued strongly against the plan to construct a small pagoda by comparing it to the incident at the riverside hamlet of Thee Mu Hta. In this hamlet (as detailed in chapter 4) the construction of a Buddhist place of worship set off a chain of events that led the Tatmadaw to the capture the whole area and dispossess most of the inhabitants. The arrival of these monks became implicated in growing fears of a new ta du ta yah hku (cool/peaceful conflict) as the “heat” of armed counterinsurgency dissipated. The presence of a framed photo of U Thuzana, alongside a vase of flowers, in Hpu Hka Hsoo’s household shrine (see figure 7) intensified the perceived linkages between the Bah Hpaw households, the visiting monks, and the threat of “cool conflict.”²

Upon learning that the villagers had banned them from building a pagoda in the village itself, the monks and Hpee Luh decided to instead build it on the highest peak in the area, which just so happened to be Ta Bu Kyoh—the seat of the kaw k’sah and thus ritually and politically central to day-to-day life. While the other villagers initially assented, many even helping the monks and the two Bah Hpaw households carry building materials to the top of the mountain, a growing torrent of discontent soon enveloped this project. Mirroring the events around the construction of the “car road” some five years prior (see chapter 3), the relative dearth of political offices and institutions in these highlands meant there was little the villagers could do to prevent the disturbance of the seat of the kaw k’sah. At this point, several people experienced vivid nightmares. They dreamt of giant mudslides engulfing the village, which recalled tales of neighboring villages being inundated when the inhabitants evoked the ire of the kaw k’sah by breaking taboos and not making sufficient amends.

The ominous sense of looming disaster that accompanied the arrival of these monks was exacerbated by the sighting of tiger pugmarks on the road close to the village. A villager first noticed these pugmarks the morning after the monks moved from the village to Ta Bu Kyoh. Taken together, these incidents pointed toward the same conclusion: Attempts to construct a pagoda at Naw Ghoo Hsaw’s “place,” her abode, were a grave k’ma (mistake). Consequently, it was surmised that the kaw k’sah, the “owner” or “queen,” of Ta K’Thwee Duh village had become terribly vexed by this mistake, and misfortune, disease, and disarray were surely not far behind.

Despite this growing discontent, again echoing the KNU project to construct a “car road,” the inhabitants of this area felt powerless to force the monks to desist. They had plainly forbidden them from constructing the small pagoda in the village proper, but this prohibition did not extend to the whole kaw. And indeed, the villagers I spoke to were wholly unsure whether, even if they had held a new meeting at the headman’s house, the decision made would have the authority to uphold a kaw-wide ban on such constructions. The ceremonial leader, the hee hkoh htee, remained, as usual, tight-lipped and unwilling or unable to intervene. Once again, they had exhausted the conventional political means at their disposal to effect change.

The situation reached a tipping point a few days after the monks had moved to the top of Ta Bu Kyoh and construction had begun in earnest. One morning, the monks abruptly decamped and returned home to Thailand. When I went to see the area where the pagoda was to be erected, around two or three weeks later, only the faintest traces of the monks’ presence remained: a small ramshackle shrine with store-bought snacks and cans of fizzy drink still resting in it and several bags of cement scattered higgledy-piggledy. The jungle had already begun to reclaim this area. Hpee Luh explained later how, when these three monks had attempted to sleep at the top of the mountain, they also had terrible dreams and experienced a series of inexplicable events. On their last night in the area, one of the monks had moved a little closer to the fire to stay warm and his robes had burst into flames, burning his leg. When they discussed their nightmares and the burning robes the following morning, the monks agreed that these were bad omens. If they were to continue, it might cause great problems in the area. Thus, they promptly ceased building the pagoda and left. Hpee Luh insisted that, at this point, none of them had any inkling of the growing discontent in Ta K’Thwee Duh.

The villagers later insisted that these events were clearly the work of Naw Ghoo Hsaw. The kaw k’sah herself was deeply displeased by the construction of a pagoda in “her place” and has once more interrupted and intervened, forcing these monks and the Bah Hpaw families to cease construction.

* * *

The events surrounding these thwarted attempts to build a pagoda on Ta Bu Kyoh rehearsed those that followed the KNU roadbuilding project seven years earlier. Once more, the villagers’ first reaction was to appeal to conventional political instruments to prevent the construction of the pagoda. In this case they turned to the headman rather than the KNU directly. It swiftly became apparent, however, that the limits of his authority coincided largely with the limits of the village. Once the construction of the pagoda was moved to take place atop Ta Bu Kyoh, all political offices and institutions in Ta K’Thwee Duh were rendered powerless to intervene. These events evoked looming threats, not only of internal strife but also of the return of the violent resource frontiers, armed conflict, and dispossession of times past. At this critical conjuncture, the kaw k’sah intervened; her spectral sovereignty interrupted day-to-day politics by affecting the bodies and lives of both the villagers and the monks and effected change.

Through her intervention, the sovereignty of the kaw k’sah acted not as a foil for the KNU’s sovereignty—as the inverse of and antagonist to the KNU (revolutionary) state—but rather, for a brief instance, it became momentarily aligned with and buttressed the KNU’s patchy control of these hills, helping repel threats of creeping ceasefire territorialization. Where the KNU’s sovereign effects tapered off, the deeply felt sovereignty of the kaw k’sah stepped in.

THE HAUNTING OF REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS

The events described above, involving the monks from Thailand, became increasingly tangled up with a growing feeling that a new ta du ta yah hku (cool/peaceful conflict), fought with religious and economic means, was afoot. While the KNU actively attempted to combat this new “soft” phase of the counterinsurgency, much like the case of a gold mining facility in the Tanintharyi Region (discussed in chapter 4), plans to construct a pagoda in Ta K’Thwee Duh Kaw still managed to slip between the considerable “gaps in the floorboards” of the KNU’s influence. However, in the interstices between states and nations along the lower Salween River, where the KNU’s reach and felt effects weakened, the kaw k’sah often flourished and intermittently intervened—in this case, sending the monks packing. The KNU’s revolutionary politics in this area were constantly haunted by spectral politics: at times opposing it, at other times patching over the gaps in its sovereignty.

Beyond a general frustration around not being informed beforehand, discontent and trepidation in relation to the pagoda-building project intensified in Ta K’Thwee Duh as it became linked to the cautionary tale of the fall of Thee Mu Hta. The pagoda became implicated in narratives and fears of a new creeping form of counterinsurgency, which I have described as ceasefire territorialization. While these fears of dispossession were also common among the political and military leadership of the KNU, their patchy control over these hills meant that they struggled to effectively deal with them.

Delving deeper, the monks’ offer of assistance to build a pagoda in Ta K’Thwee Duh Kaw shared many aspects with the cautionary tale of Thee Mu Hta. Both instances involved the promise of something seemingly benign that people genuinely desired. Albeit overtly, the highly contentious monk U Thuzana was implicated in both cases. As touched on earlier, U Thuzana was also embroiled in the fall of the once-vibrant center of the revolution, Manerplaw, in 1994 to 1995. This event was well known as a watershed in the armed conflict, regularly debated by villagers and generals alike. In a strikingly similar pattern, prior to the fall Manerplaw, U Thuzana built a so-called peace pagoda on a hill beside it. He then invited Buddhist rank-and-file soldiers, largely disaffected with the Christian-dominated leadership of the KNU, to join him there with promises of significant improvements in their lives (Smith 1999, 446–47; South 2008, 58–59). These soldiers went on to form the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) and soon after assisted the Tatmadaw in overrunning Manerplaw. I often heard tales of how Buddhist monks were “tempting” and corrupting people in these highlands, turning them against the KNU and their fellow Pwakanyaw—“brother against brother,” as the more Christian-oriented villagers put it.

This was the context in which talk of Hpu Hka Hsoo having “given way to temptations” and having become “crazy with religion” played out. While never uttered explicitly, these pronouncements intimated that Hpu Hka Hsoo had become tangled up with U Thuzana, the DKBA, and by implication the growing ta du ta yah hku (cool/peaceful conflict). The unannounced arrival of these three foreign monks, and their plans to build a pagoda in one of the most potent areas of Ta K’Thwee Duh Kaw, then became ensnared in cautionary tales and growing fears that the Tatmadaw was continuing counterinsurgency by expanding religious and economic spheres.

Whether or not these three monks, and perhaps the Bah Hpaw households, were in fact party to an elaborate Tatmadaw complot to capture Ta Bu Kyoh is of less concern here. As I have emphasized from the start, I am more interested in the effects such events had on day-to-day life and politics. My focus is on how the arrival of these monks evoked growing trepidations toward a creeping ceasefire territorialization and how people in the Mutraw hills grappled with it.

As discussed previously, while the KNU made concerted efforts to combat creeping counterinsurgency, these efforts were constantly frustrated by the friction of the physical and political terrain of these highlands. The KNU, for all intents and purposes, acted as the de facto state, but its sovereignty grew threadbare in certain out-of-the-way swaths of the Mutraw District. People often spoke warmly of the KNU state as “our government” and “our leaders,” many yearning for it to have more influence in these highlands. Yet, like the states that reigned before them, the KNU continued to struggle in asserting a lasting effect on the day-to-day lives and politics of the people living there. Moreover, local political institutions such as the headman, tied to the KNU governance system, and the ceremonial leader the hee hkoh htee were largely powerless to intervene, vested with little tangible authority to effect change. Consequently, when the monks arrived to assist Hpee Luh and her household construct a pagoda, while many of the villagers were ill at ease with the prospect, they felt that the KNU was too distant and spread too thinly to assist them. What is more, local institutions proved to be toothless when plans were moved outside of the village proper.

The kaw k’sah’s intervention, which sent these monks packing back to Thailand, suggested a far more complicated relation between the KNU and the spectral realm than one of constant opposition and competition over sovereignty. The kaw k’sah had effectively pushed back against and indeed foiled what for many was a very real threat of dispossession. While the kaw k’sah effected this change in response to a k’ma (mistake) in the area under its dominion, its response simultaneously complemented, and indeed augmented, the KNU’s patchy sovereignty over these highlands. To better grasp the relationship between state and spectral politics, I revisit the notion of contact zone as a space of asymmetrical negotiation.

In chapter 1, I draw on recent adaptions of Mary Louise Pratt’s (1991, 2008) notion of contact zones to describe these highlands as more-than-human contact zones (Isaacs and Otruba 2019). In contact zones, different human regimes of power as well as more-than-human realms are locked in both asymmetrical clashes and constant negotiation and mutual accommodation. By locating the KNU and the kaw k’sah in a contact zone, it becomes clear that, while relations between them were entrenched in vast disparities of power, these relations always also entailed co-presence, playful negotiations, improvisation, and co-option (Clifford 1997; Pratt 2008). They constantly oscillated between relations of opposition and collaboration, where these two heterogeneous modes of sovereignty occasionally became positively related. The KNU’s sovereignty was accompanied and, at times, buttressed by its spectral other.

Symbiotic Events and Alter-Politics

In the Mutraw hills, standard revolutionary politics of setting up a state to rival the (predatory) nation-state, which they were locked in conflict with, was perpetually shadowed by spectral sovereignty, which acted as an alternative mode of politics. Such a myriad of coexisting modes of politics is commonly understood in terms of what Isabelle Stengers ([1997] 2010) calls cosmopolitics. For Bruno Latour the notion of cosmopolitics widens politics to “embrace, literally, everything—including the vast numbers of nonhuman entities making humans act” (2004, 454). It is not, as he stresses, the case that people can simply “leave their gods on hooks in the cloakroom” when they enter into negotiations; rather, they always bring with them a “freight of gods, attachments, and unruly cosmos” (456–57). As I argue throughout this book, we must take the actions of more-than-humans seriously as alternative modes of sovereignty, ownership, and thus politics at large.

Notions of cosmopolitics, however, tend to give rise to a kind of “war of the worlds” between clashing cosmologies (Latour 2004, 454; see also Latour 2002). By contrast, I prefer to draw on the ideas of more-than-human contact zones. More-than-human contact zones are spaces not only of constant opposition between radically different and indeed incommensurable worlds but also of encounter between different cosmologies, modes of ownership, and sovereignty and between human and more-than-human realms—locked in processes of continual negotiation and mutual accommodation.

The instance of the aborted pagoda construction on Ta Bu Kyoh stands in stark contrast to previous cases, such as the construction of the “car road,” where the KNU’s state politics constantly clashed with and was frustrated by the spectral sovereignty of the kaw k’sah. In this case, these different modes of politics became momentarily complementary. As Pratt points out, in taking a contact perspective, our attention is drawn to “how subjects get constituted in and by relation to one another” (2008, 8).

The KNU’s seven-decade-long struggle for autonomy, focused on opposition and resistance to the Tatmadaw and the Myanmar state, can be grasped in terms of what Ghassan Hage (2015) describes as anti-politics. Anti-politics, such as anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism, overwhelmingly focus on the most pertinent task at hand: the overturning of (unjust) political orders. However, in such a singular focus, this mode of politics is less successful in transforming opposition into an alternative to the reality they have overturned (Hage 2015, 2). In anti-colonialist struggles around the world, when colonial leaders are thrown out and replaced by Indigenous ones, the oppressive government apparatus underlying colonial rule often remains intact, leading history to repeat itself.

In southeast Myanmar the KNU has long strived to attain a counter-state, Kawthoolei or Karen-land. This state has been imagined as a space to shelter the persecuted Karen people (San C. Po 1928) and was brought into being through the establishment of parallel forms of governance systems, laws, and bureaucracies. In this manner, the Kawthoolei (revolutionary) state was in many ways a mirror image of its Myanmar counterpart. This became particularly evident in chapter 4, where I explore the stalemate that followed the ceasefire agreements beginning in 2012, between the dueling visions of the nation-state of Myanmar and Kawthoolei. The Kawthoolei state was (and continues to be) highly effective at both protecting people from the predations of the Tatmadaw and providing vital services such as education and health. However, following the ceasefire there was, as Hage argues, a “routinisation of notions of crisis where conflict and war situations were increasingly perceived as states in their own right rather than as transitional towards something else”—such that politics became bogged down in “unproductive and endless oppositions” (2015, 62).

To break out of this impasse of dueling oppositions, I join Hage’s call to not abandon anti-politics (and the many successes wrought by them) entirely but rather attempt to (more comprehensively) weave them together with modes of alter-politics that come from outside these endless oppositions. Alter-politics points toward the possibility that “another world is possible” by gesturing toward an “otherwise” that is continually “at odds with dominant and dominating ways of being” (Povinelli 2011; see also Povinelli 2012). Alter-politics are social forces and potentialities that continually “haunt” us with the possibility of other ways of dwelling and being enmeshed in the world, which we must become aware of and animate (Hage 2015, 54–55).

Responding to this call, I attend closely to and take seriously the way the persistent presence of spectral sovereignty haunted the KNU’s revolutionary politics. Following the arguments made in part 1, people living in possessed landscapes along the lower Salween River treated the earth beneath their feet less as a set of resources to be managed and extracted than as a place teeming with and already owned by more-than-human life. Landscapes could only ever be borrowed, with the solemn promise to return them to their real spectral owners. Humans were interminably engaged in processes of making and maintaining “good relations” with the spectral realm. Such modes of alter-politics offered a way out of the stalemate of the ceasefire, by pointing toward radically alternative ways of being enmeshed in and relating to the world.

It is important to note here that momentary alignments between the spectral realm and the KNU did not require that their vast differences be bridged by force, compelling them to become the same. Rather, these two heterogeneous modes of politics, through deep histories of encounter, had worked out a relation, a mutual understanding—enabling them to coexist while still following their own interests, akin to the relation between the phasmid (stick insect) and the twig (Nathan 2004, 526–27). This act of working out relations did not require that they recognize and accept each other as such but simply be moved by each other (527).

Such an arrangement resembled what Stengers calls a “symbiotic event” (2011, 60), whereby two heterogeneous terms relate even as they diverge. These events of connection are less about common interest between the two parties than of opportunities in which their “diverging interests now need each other” (60). Spectral sovereignty and the KNU shared deep histories of encounter, such that these heterogeneous modes of politics had hashed out a working relationship. It is doubtful that the KNU and the kaw k’sah came together under a common interest, such as a shared desire to resist ceasefire territorialization. When the kaw k’sah affected the bodies of the monks, moving them to leave these highlands, the correspondence with KNU’s strategic goals was more a case of opportunity. Their diverging interests simply happened to coincide and to need each other. As I have argued throughout, symbiotic events “demand that we do not accept settled ways of life as being given” (Stengers 2011, 61). They come together only to divide again in indeterminate ways.

The arrival of the monks to Ta K’Thwee Duh, and the subsequent intervention of the kaw k’sah, was one such “symbiotic event.” In the weeks after the monks absconded back to Thailand, this event continued to reverberate, animating KNU state policy. In a meeting held in Pa Heh, the seat of the local village tract, the KNLA commanders, KNU leaders, and the villagers agreed that, following these events, they would prohibit the building of new Buddhist structures unless over thirty households were Buddhist. Since few villages were larger than thirty households, and none fully Buddhist, this prohibition effectively acted as a blanket ban on all new Buddhist structures. In this manner, the sovereignty of the kaw k’sah preceded and haunted that of the KNU’s sovereignty, provoking them to act. For a fleeting moment, these two modes of politics came together to effect a lasting change, even as they continued to diverge.

“MAKING FRIENDS” IN VIOLENT FRONTIERS

Tracing the history of how villagers in Ta K’Thwee Duh decided to protect two forested areas from overhunting, touched on in the introduction to this book, really drove home for me the ways human and spectral worlds and different modes of politics were becoming aligned. To protect these forests, the villagers had initially and repeatedly appealed to the KNU’s Forest Department for a community forest title. Only when these appeals were indefinably deferred and ultimately failed did they decide to take the matter into their own hands. They began experimenting first with Buddhist, then Indigenous modes of conservation, oriented toward ray daw (making friends) with more-than-human others and ecologies. In the process, they created small pockets of autonomy in these highlands.

* * *

Villagers regularly voiced deep concerns about a rocky stretch of land on the western border of Ta K’Thwee Duh Kaw known as Way Pgha. In this swath of land, too rough to clear for cultivation, a large and vibrant primary forest flourished. It hosted numerous old-growth trees of impressive proportions and a plethora of animals. People had, for instance, encountered sun bears, which are on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List as vulnerable (Scotson et al. 2017), and great hornbills, also categorized as vulnerable (BirdLife International 2018), in Way Pgha. The most impressive old-growth tree that found shelter here was a giant banyan that stood almost exactly in the middle of the forest. When this banyan fruited, it attracted animals from miles around. As Hpee Luh’s son Hpa Kha Pa evocatively spoke of it, “When the banyan tree fruits, it is like it is making a lu ta [offering]. The banyan makes an offering of fresh fruit, then calls upon animals far and wide to come and share its bounty.” Likewise, as Hpa Kha Pa and many others explained, tigers (Panthera tigris) listed as endangered (Goodrich et al. 2015) “like these kinds of rocky areas,” such as this forest. At least three different tigers had been spotted passing through Way Pgha on regular occasions.

The villagers were especially concerned about an area of Way Pgha with a rock face pockmarked with pah poo, the burrows of Asiatic brush-tailed porcupines (Atherurus macrourus). The villagers feared that these porcupines were being overhunted, since one could simply sit in front of the entrance of their burrows as dusk approached and pick them off one by one as they emerged. This was indicative of wider concerns, especially among village elders, that, following decades of armed conflict, these highlands were awash with modern firearms (such as AR-15-style rifles used by soldiers), which were increasingly used for hunting. Use of automatic weapons made the killing of animals “a little too easy,” as one young soldier who often hunted with his service rifle put it. Most agreed that, if they did not do something quickly, there would be few animals remaining. The ever-loquacious Hpu Hkee put it bluntly that, “if we do not do anything now, then there will be no animals left for my children and grandchildren to kill and to eat.” Consequently, the three men I introduce in the introduction, together with Hpu Hkee and the headman, began discussing how to protect their forests from overexploitation and how to keep it in their hands, so it could not be grabbed by the growing number of outside actors coming to these highlands.

To stem the rising tide of concerns around the status of the flora and fauna in Way Pgha, the villagers in Ta K’Thwee Duh attempted to prohibit people from hunting in this area. They began by trying to issue a decree banning hunting in Way Pgha via a meeting held in the headman’s house. This decree had much the same effect as the ban on building a Buddhist pagoda in the kaw. During this meeting they struggled to come to a consensus as to how they would actually go about prohibiting people from hunting there in practice. They were unsure whether they had the authority to forbid people from hunting in an area so far from the village proper. And even if they did succeed and the residents of Ta K’Thwee Duh completely stopped hunting in Way Pgha, they held little faith that this ban would be respected by people from the surrounding kaw and farther afield. What is more, they had no way of enforcing such a prohibition, unless one of the villagers gave up farming to constantly patrol the forest. To address these issues, for several years they tried and failed to secure a community forest land title from the Karen Forestry Department (KFD) as a more robust legal instrument for enforcing this prohibition.

Despite numerous trips to the KFD offices in the administrative center, the villagers in Ta K’Thwee Duh felt no closer to their goal. From KFD officials and KESAN staff I learned that they still lacked the workforce and capability to extend operations to the very top of the Bu Thoe ridge. They could only offer minimal support for local small-scale initiatives to protect forests. Despite these setbacks, the villagers continued to push for an official community forest title. Many felt that holding a land title would best allow them to enforce the protected status of Way Pgha, since official KNU-stamped documents were recognized and respected not only by the local villagers but also by outsiders passing through. What is more, if it were to become an official community forest, the KFD might even employ someone to actually enforce the ban on hunting.

As hope faded that the KNU would be able to help them, in lieu of an officially sanctioned community forest, some villagers attempted to take matters into their own hands. One of the first local attempts to protect this area was led by Hpu Hka Hsoo, who enlisted the help of the very same monks we met in the previous section. He hoped, with the monks’ assistance, they could finally protect Way Pgha.

* * *

In these highlands there was a growing awareness that the environment was being depleted and that an increasing number of outside actors were exacerbating the problem. People’s reactions to looming environmental degradation followed a similar pattern to their reactions to other forms of disorder, as described in part 1 of this book. After failing to solve the issue locally through the (highly limited) authority of the headman, they appealed to the KNU directly to secure land titles. Akin to the strategies employed farther south (see chapter 4), the KNU’s policy of issuing land titles was deeply entangled with their efforts to map these highlands and make them legible, allowing them to assert their sovereignty and counter Tatmadaw attempts to territorialize these landscapes. In this light, KNU’s land titles, which mirrored those issued by the Myanmar government, were a form of counter-titling.

Notwithstanding the KNU’s and the KFD’s encouragements for residents in the Mutraw hills to apply for community forest titles, the KNU’s bureaucratic ability to award titles and their sovereignty to enforce them became frayed in the Mutraw hills. In response to this failure to receive help from the KNU, the villagers took matters into their own hands. First, they turned to the encompassing sovereignty of the Buddha. Later, they appealed to the spectral realm. In the process spectral politics sometimes indirectly complemented and extended the KNU’s political strivings.

When Trees Become Monks

Another area the residents of Ta K’Thwee Duh were deeply concerned about, touched on in the introduction, was the riparian buffer strip of forest around the loh, the forest where the k’la (spirits, shades) of the dead resided. On the one hand, a bend in the river in the middle of the loh, where the water slowed to a crawl, was a spawning ground for a great number of fish and other aquatic creatures. The villagers feared that people were overfishing the loh since the fish were easier to catch here, just as the porcupine in Way Pgha were being overhunted. If nothing was done, they reasoned, there would soon be nothing left to eat in the river. On the other hand, villagers were concerned that outsiders were visiting the loh and removing things. As shown, when a person died, items they were fond of—such as their clothes, an old umbrella, or their favorite hunting rifle—were conveyed to this area at the end of the funeral, along with bone fragments and a lock of their hair. Since the dead lived in the ta taw ta loh kaw (the spectral realm) where everything was hkoh hkee, or “backward,” all these items were ritually destroyed by their relatives to become whole again in the loh. Villagers feared that outsiders might not understand that such broken items belonged to the dead and be tempted to take them home as souvenirs. These concerns were compounded by tales, such as those told by Hpu Hka Hsoo, of how people regularly heard the sounds of weeping emanating from the loh at night. Such stories led some to speculate that the k’la of the dead, or loh k’sah, the “owner of the loh,” were upset because people kept taking their things. Such apprehensions were at once political, ecological, and cosmological in nature.

So, when the monk first came to Ta K’Thwee Duh to visit the two Bah Hpaw households, Hpu Hka Hsoo requested that he also help them protect both Way Pgha and the watershed forest along the loh. Hpu Hka Hsoo had seen how Thai monks wrapped their robes around trees to protect them from logging and hoped something similar could be done for the forests of Way Pgha and the loh. Through this ritual, a forest comes under the encompassing protection of the Buddha. Hpee Luh described how the monk agreed to help and began by ripping up several strips of a saffron-orange monk’s robe. He then proceeded to chant a prayer forty times, one time for each of his forty years of life. These robes were given to Hpu Hka Hsoo with strict instructions that he wrap them around trees at the four corners of the loh. Because Way Pgha was a much larger area than the loh, he instructed Hpu Hka Hsoo to only wrap robes around the trees surrounding the porcupine burrows, to ensure that at least this area was protected. Hpu Hka Hsoo then hung warning signs stating, variously, pgha tah (protected/prohibited forest) and ta hpoe khah t’mee lah lah, aw t’ghay, ma thee t’ghay, roughly translating to “it is prohibited to eat or kill any living creature.”

The ritual was initially a resounding success. Tales circulated among households in the village about another area that the monk had protected in this manner. In this area a man defied the ban on hunting, later falling off the roof of his house and breaking his spine. As a consequence, people in Ta K’Thwee Duh Kaw and the surrounding area dared not kill so much as an insect when walking through the watershed forest around the loh and the protected areas of Way Pgha.

Despite the initial success of the monk’s protection ritual—finally achieving the common goal of protecting these two heavily forested areas from overexploitation—some villagers became increasingly vocal in their criticism of the initiative. They openly voiced their discomfort with the notion that their forests were now effectively under the protective influence of foreign Buddhist monks and worried about the implications of doing this. The ceremony conducted by the monk with strips of robes is better known as “tree ordination.” Through fastening a strip of blessed robe to a tree, it effectively becomes a Buddhist monk. The trees and the area around them are protected since anyone who attempts to cut them down or kill animals near them was now technically assaulting a Buddhist monk, a serious offense.

The chorus of discontent reached fever pitch following the very same monk’s failed attempts to build a pagoda at the top of Ta Bu Kyoh a year later. The cautionary tale of Thee Mu Hta, and its association to DKBA’s split from the KNU, was increasingly tangled up with these Thai monks’ attempts to construct a pagoda. Subsequently, the status of these forested areas under the protection of Buddhist monks—the trees that were now monks—also came into question. Like attempts to build a pagoda, these protected forests became implicated in this new ta du ta yah hku (cool/peaceful conflict).

* * *

Attempting to take care of the situation on their own, the villagers once more turned to alternative modes of politics. Having little luck enrolling the local KNU’s sovereignty to aid them, they appealed to the sovereignty of the Buddhist monks, and perhaps also the Buddha himself, as a way to protect their environments. Yet, as Nicola Tannenbaum (2000) shows, such tree ordinations draw the people involved into wider religious, social, economic, and political networks across the region. Thus, in the face of a growing panic over the expansion of religious spheres as a form of ceasefire territorialization in the Mutraw highlands, the assistance of these monks was tarred with the same brush. The monks’ intervention was viewed as a threat. People worried that, rather than helping to protect these forests, the monks’ actions might, knowingly or otherwise, aid and abet the Tatmadaw in territorializing these uplands and dispossessing its inhabitants. In response, a group of young(ish) men from the village sought out alternatives in Thoo Hkoh/Moh La Pa Lah (animist/ancestral) practices, turning to the Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah, the sovereign of all specters, to provide a more encompassing form of protection (see figure 8).

Making Friends with the Owner of Honesty

While, following the intervention of the monks, most villagers (sometimes begrudgingly) consented to not kill or eat any living being in the watershed forest around the loh, this did not extend to people from outside the kaw. Moreover, a great deal of disagreement and debate continued to swirl around which parts of Way Pgha they could hunt and fish in. Some people I spoke with insisted the monks’ protection only covered the open rock face pockmarked with porcupine burrows or only the porcupines themselves. Others told me it was now prohibited to hunt in the forested area immediately around the burrows. The limits of the protected area remained unclear and open to much interpretation. Most chose an interpretation that best suited their needs. It also remained unclear as to what extent people could still forage and fell trees in this area.

Eventually, a group of men around my age (that is to say, early to mid-thirties at the time) whom I had grown close to and (predictably) the outspoken elder Hpu Hkee decided to nip these debates in the bud. Tired of all the squabbling and backbiting, and with no sign that the KNU would step in any time soon, one evening over several bottles of rice wine they resolved to protect these forests themselves. They agreed to do this by appealing not to monks, nor even to the kaw k’sah, as Hpu Hkee had done previously in relation to the “car road.” Instead, they decided to “put it in the hands” of the highest spectral authority in the realm. They planned to place the forest under the protection of the Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah, literally the owner of all honesty, who was the paramount spectral presence in these lands.

The closest I found to a generic name for the specters in their entirety and complexity was (as discussed in chapter 1) ta taw ta loh and the realm in which they resided as ta taw ta loh kaw. Given that ta taw ta loh can be translated as either honesty or “that which is true,” a literal rendering of the realm in which they resided is “the realm of that which is true.” Thus, the name Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah translates to the “owner/lord of all that is true,” intimating that this specter was the paramount owner/master over all other specters. This rendering was borne out in the way this sovereign of all spectral sovereigns was treated in everyday life.

All along these highlands, before each meal the patriarch of the household placed a small morsel of food, may koh, or “first rice,” on the highest ledge in the house. He then whispered an invocation entreating the Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah to join them to eat together and to protect them. The same was the case when people drank rice wine. When the first bottle of a new batch of wine was opened, the first drops—thee koh, or “first alcohol”—were poured into a fine bone china cup and given to the oldest man in attendance. He took the cup between his hands, holding it up to his chest and gently letting the alcohol drip onto the floor in front of him, whispering an invocation to the Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah. He invited this specter to enjoy the first drops of alcohol, together with them, and to look over and protect them. These libations also preceded lu ta and other offerings: The Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah was invited to drink first, followed by the other specters, in order of precedence, and then finally the humans. The Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah, the elders explained to me, as the most senior and most important presence, always went first. This spectral sovereign, they explained, was akin to Y’wa. However, Y’wa left the human realm to take his place in moh koh (heaven/the firmament), relinquishing his influence over day-to-day life on earth. The Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah, by contrast, was immanent in all things and saw everything: “It is all around you and in your mind,” I was often told.³ This led elders such as Hpu Gay to describe this spectral sovereign of sovereigns as synonymous with nay suh, or nature itself.⁴

Just as with the other spectral persons that inhabited and crowded these possessed landscapes, offerings to the Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah were a way to ray daw, “make friends with” or “work together with” them. As a common adage, regularly recited by elders, went:

If you want to eat the lizard egg, you must make friends with the termite mound.

If you want to eat the mushrooms, you must make friends with the fallen log.

If you want good fortune/good things [ta ghay ta wa], you must make friends with the elders.

Hpu Gay elaborated on this adage explaining that, just as one must “make friends” with the environments and elders, one must make and maintain good relations with spectral sovereigns in order to have good health and a good harvest. So “we have to help each other,” he concluded. Sharing food and alcohol, as one does with neighbors, engendered a “friendship” that wove people, specters, and ecologies together.

* * *

Such concerted efforts to make friends with these spectral sovereigns, and the landscapes they possessed, bear a family resemblance to Eleana Kim’s (2022) notion of “making peace with nature” in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the two Koreas. Akin to Kim’s work, “making friends” intimated a less anthropocentric and more open-ended approach to peacebuilding, which resonated with cosmopolitical orientations embracing a myriad of political actors, human and otherwise. In this light, it becomes clear that these acts of “making friends” were highly political endeavors of interminable positioning and counter-positioning. Accordingly, what I found most striking in the events described above was the way in which, by “making friends” through making offerings to the Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah, these highlanders were also effectively maneuvering themselves to be better positioned vis-à-vis this spectral sovereign to make demands upon it.

As described in chapter 3, relations between spectral sovereigns were arranged in an unsettled nesting hierarchy, wherein the Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah was the most senior. This arrangement allowed for considerable wiggle room for positioning, not only for the more junior spectral sovereigns but also for the humans who propitiated them. As is the case in Myanmar more generally, hierarchical superiority implies not only power over those in subordinate positions but also obligations to them, to protect and provide for them (Keeler 2017, 22). Indeed, across Southeast Asia, sovereignty is commonly rooted in the ruler’s responsibility to provide for the other (Tan 2019). Consequently, by positioning themselves within this hierarchy, while at the very bottom rung, people were better able to make demands on their spectral sovereigns: to provide for them, help their crops grow, and offer them protection from harm. From this vantage point, the villagers in Ta K’Thwee Duh could then call upon the Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah to bring these forests under its sovereignty and thus also its protection.

Putting Environments in Spectral Hands

Following the growing discontent in the village at the prospect that some of their trees had become ordained monks, this group of young(ish) men leaped into action. Rather than calling a meeting at the headman’s house, they went door-to-door. At each household they explained that they intended to “put the forests in the hands of the Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah,” as they put it, asking them for their consent. When the villagers overwhelmingly assented to this plan, these men, together with Naw Paw and myself, set out from the village. With two cans of paint and numerous bottles of alcohol clinking in our bags, we made our way to the forests to place them under the sovereignty and protection of the Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah. We began at the loh, which was closest to the village, and completed the process in Way Pgha a week later. On the trip to the loh, all the men donned matching red and white Karen shirts since (as noted in the introduction) it was said that the ancestors preferred that people wore “Pwakanyaw clothes.” In Way Pgha, however, both Hpa Kha Pa and Hpu Hkee, who joined us for this trip, wore T-shirts with the core ambition of the Salween Peace Park emblazoned on them.

These shirts were handed out at the Salween Peace Park consultation meeting in December 2016. The front bore the words, written in English and Pwakanyaw, “Keeping ancestral territories, nature stewardship, peace and development in Indigenous people’s hands.” All but one person in this party, like me, had attended the consultation meeting in the regional capital Deh Bu Noh the previous year to learn more about the peace park. At this meeting, KESAN activists and KFD officers had collectively encouraged the villagers to protect their environments. Furthermore, these officers detailed how one way people could do this was by creating community forests in their kaw. However, while clearly buoyed by these words, these men continued to express considerable skepticism toward the Salween Peace Park itself; they worried about how its implementation on the ground might affect their day-to-day lives.

Each trip followed a similar sequence of events but was most elaborate in the larger Way Pgha area. Upon arriving at a hut on the edge of Way Pgha, we began by painting new warning signs in gaudy orange paint. Like those hung up by Hpu Hka Hsoo several years earlier, each sign declared “Protected forest: Prohibited to eat or kill any living creature.” With the signs painted, we set out into the forests proper, stopping at the border. Here Hpa Kha Pa made a notch, then nailed the first sign to a tree with his machete. After observing our handiwork for a few moments, Naw Paw and the men posed with the other signs, staring gravely down the lens of my camera. When he was not affixing signs to trees, Hpa Kha Pa filmed everything on his mobile phone.

Following the obligatory photoshoot, we all crouched down, facing the same direction. Hpu Hkee explained that we had to face mu taw (east) when praying to the Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah. “Mu taw means ‘where the sun rises,’ and is the place of growing and development. You must always face in this direction if you want ta ghay ta wah [good things] to happen,” he insisted. Producing two bottles of rice wine from his shoulder bag, Hpa Kha Pa filled two cups, passing one to Hpu Hkee. The two men then began a long invocation and prayer, calling on the names of the Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah (who was known by many names) to ask for an extension of a special protection to this area of Way Pgha. The others in attendance clasped their hands together, fingers splayed, and eyes firmly shut (although I had to peek to follow their actions). After the libations were completed, the cups were passed around so each of us could take a sip, before they were returned to Hpa Kha Pa and Hpu Hkee. Following this prayer, we drank normally, chatting and joking around. When we had emptied the two bottles, we scrambled down into the forest proper, pushing our way through thickets of double-barbed rattan, trudging through streams and waterfalls, to reach the different spots where Hpu Hka Hsoo had affixed strips of the monk’s robe. At each stop a new sign was hung, with great care taken to not disturb the robe itself, and the old signs that had been effaced by the elements were rewritten. Rather than replacing older forms of protection, an additional layer was placed over them.

Each time we affixed a sign to a tree, we gathered again and repeated the round of libations, invocations, and prayers to the Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah, not leaving until we had drained the bottle of alcohol. We repeated this process six times in total (and four times in the loh). This event was a jubilant affair, no doubt facilitated by the copious amounts of alcohol we imbued. We regularly stopped at particularly scenic areas, such as a tiered waterfall, where Hpa Kha Pa and I were instructed to take photographs. Once more, they held up their signs and looked deadly serious, only to burst into fits of laughter as Naw Paw and I struggled valiantly to climb the steep embankments and wade up to our knees in the small stream at the bottom of the forest—tumbling, scrambling, puffing, and panting as we progressed.

When all the signs were hung, the prayers uttered, and the alcohol exhausted, we staggered home again through forests and fields. In the following days and weeks, I found that much of the disagreement and debate around the extent of Way Pgha that was protected had dissipated. With both Way Pgha and the loh “in the hands of the Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah,” a broad consensus emerged that it was prohibited to hunt in both these forests and that terrible consequences would hound anyone who attempted to disturb them.

* * *

Through these actions, rather than supplanting one another, these different modes of politics were layered, one over the other. This could be seen in how, when experimenting with Indigenous modes of conservation to protect the two forests, the men took great care not to disturb the monks’ robes and the old signs. Rather than removing them, they wrote upon former forms of protection (quite literally in the case of the signs), layering an additional mode of sovereignty on top of the robes and signs. This could also be discerned in how the men wore KESAN T-shirts when protecting Way Pgha. This was less a full-throated endorsement of the Salween Peace Park writ large (especially given their continued reservation) than a way of pragmatically layering or stacking different modes of politics, one upon the other. In this manner, this jumble of divergent forms of sovereignty and politics temporarily became aligned to achieve the same goal. This practice of layering or piling many modes of politics upon one another resembles a palimpsest or pentimento on which new layers are applied, but imprints of earlier versions continue to be discerned underneath (cf. McConnachie 2014; Simpson 2014, 25; Tsing, Deger et al. 2024, 8).

Through these actions, the specters once more intervened and became interwoven with human affairs. For the time being at least, these forests had been successfully protected; the sovereignty of the Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah had transformed these areas into de facto locally defined community forests—and pockets of autonomy. This was where the story ended for me. I left a few weeks after Way Pgha was placed under the protection of this spectral sovereign. Three years later, the revenant of war returned to these highlands. Only time will tell how these in situ experiments in drawing on spectral sovereignty to protect the environment will play out in the future.

INTERSTITIAL SPACES OF CONVIVIALITY AND AUTONOMY

Much like the case of the KNU-backed road constructed along the Bu Thoe ridge, there was scant evidence of the villagers in Ta K’Thwee Duh “evading” or positioning themselves “against” the state (Clastres 1987; Scott 2009) through their efforts to protect the loh and Way Pgha. On the contrary, they repeatedly turned to the KNU state, entreating them for help, and engaged in negotiations with them—just as they did with spectral sovereigns. These highlands were spaces of conviviality, between humans, specters, and the landscapes they possessed and between different modes of politics.

The Mutraw hills were, as I have stressed throughout, located in a contact zone, at the interstices between states, locked in continual asymmetrical negotiations. Contact zones, however, are not only spaces of inherent violence and negotiation. They are also sites of play and experimentation (Haraway 2007) and sites of intimacy and dependency (Faier 2009, 12; Wilson 2019, 715; Yeoh and Willis 2005): spaces for making friends and good relations. I grasp the intimacy and dependency inherent in such interstitial spaces in terms of conviviality, in the sense of “living-with.”

In his definition of conviviality, Ivan Illich eschews the common understandings of the word in English that “now seeks the company of tipsy jollyness” ([1973] 1975, 12–13). He favored the more austere meaning of eutrapelia, taken from Aristotle and Aquinas, of being skilled in conversation. I, on the contrary, find the sense of “tipsy jollyness” rather befitting here. Bearing in mind that the term conviviality in English derives from the Latin word convivium, or “a feast,” describing practices of ray daw, making friends in terms of feasting and drinking together with other humans and spectral persons in a state of “tipsy jollyness” seems rather apt. Conviviality also connotes a sense of cohabitation and interaction that, in its radical openness, offers a measure of distance from identity (Gilroy 2004, xi) while also rejecting divisions between humans and their environments (Büscher and Fletcher 2020, 160–61).

Following Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher, I grasp conviviality, more specifically, as the ongoing action of the “building of long-lasting, engaging and open-ended relationships with nonhumans and ecologies” (2020, 164). As argued above, the work of creating conviviality does not demand that the different parties must become alike, or even have a common interest, in order to come into relation. This sense of conviviality, or cosmopolitical peace (Kim 2022; Latour 2004), as I have shown, extended beyond brokering convivial and peaceful relation between humans, specters, and ecologies; it also embraced engendering good relations between different modes of politics.

As the civil war wound down toward the end of the 2010s, these highlands were becoming a space for staging encounters with different modes of politics and sovereignties. By experimenting with placing their forest “in the hands of the Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah” (the sovereign of all spectral sovereigns) to protect them, the people of Ta K’Thwee Duh were also opening up small pockets of autonomy. Much like the sovereignty of the patchworks of kaw lands ultimately ruled over by the kaw k’sah, the aim of these experiments in Indigenous conservation was neither to set up a counter-state nor to cause the state to wither away but instead to generate what Simon Critchley refers to as an “interstitial distance within the state territory” (2007, 92). As I shall explore closer in the epilogue to this book, these practices gestured toward highly relational modes of autonomy (cf. Ong, Stalemate, 2023). Such acts of local self-determination, while not their intention, occasionally coincided with and augmented the KNU’s over seventy-year struggle for greater autonomy in southeast Myanmar.

In the next and final chapter, I turn my attention to the Salween Peace Park itself to explore how it was purposely building on these fleeting moments of connection between different modes of politics in the Mutraw hills. By tapping into Indigenous practices of possessing landscapes, and these budding experiments in conservation and autonomy, the activists behind the Salween Peace Park were prefiguring radically new modes of conservation and self-determination—what I call liberation conservation.